Two months ago I tried the MCP service of a domestic patent database vendor. Their AI offering seemed to have been out for a while, the docs looked complete and the feature coverage was broad, so I asked them for a trial. In practice the product is still rough, and it is not cheap either — in the end we simply had the agent drive a browser to reach the AI.

After I handed my workspace over to agents in May, my token usage went completely off the rails (see [My Token Usage Exploded 13× in Three Months]). Then DeepSeek raised its prices in August, the official API became genuinely unaffordable, and the only thing left to do was hunt down cheap third parties. So over the past six months I’ve tried pretty much every token plan (monthly or prepaid quota) I could get my hands on — three Chinese cloud vendors and five overseas ones.

This isn’t a recommendation list. It’s just a record of what I ran into: the good parts praised, the painful parts reported as they were.

A while back I said to a friend, half joking: “With the amount of AI I’m burning through, if I ever did get to be a boss, I’d squeeze my underlings harder than any boss I’ve ever had.” Then I got a little curious myself — is there actually any data behind that feeling?

So I pulled every commit and PR timestamp from 2025 and 2026 across all my repositories (40+) with the gh CLI, and looked at the distribution from two angles: volume and timing. Let’s see how black-hearted I really am.

I’ve been using multiple devices for a long time — my own laptop, servers, NAS, company servers. All of them accessed via SSH clients. Honestly, logging into servers manually and typing out commands for cleanup, maintenance, and troubleshooting gets pretty tedious.

To save myself the trouble, I’ve been using opencode to do cleanup and maintenance work directly on the target machines. It works, sure, but there’s one unavoidable hassle: you have to install opencode on that machine first. You have to deal with environments, dependencies, keys, and if you also need to work inside containers, it gets even more annoying.

So I’ve been keeping an eye on tools like Wrap — SSH clients with built-in AI. But I didn’t want to pay extra just for that. Eventually I found Netcatty.

I recently watched two videos — one about Vibe Coding and another about AI’s greatest help. Looking back, both explore the same question: what can Agents really change, and what do they bring?

A while ago, Alibaba released a coding agent called Qoder, and suddenly a research report claimed its market share surpassed Claude Code. I immediately smelled something fishy: this thing barely has any users, so how did it suddenly become “number one”?

DeepSeek recently officially raised its prices. As someone whose token usage was closing in on 100M tokens last quarter (see [My Token Usage Exploded 13× in Three Months]), I didn’t pay much attention at first — after all, DeepSeek was already very cheap, and even the raised price was still lower than the official price announced when V4 first launched. But I underestimated my usage: after a day of real-world testing at the new prices, it became clear that the cost is genuinely hard for an individual to bear. If I didn’t find a way around it, I’d be working just to pay for tokens.

I came across news about Lenovo’s new machine, the IdeaPad Vibe, these past few days. As someone who has been waiting for the Windows camp to respond since March or April, after reading through the coverage, all I can say is… come on, is that it?

I wanted to share files on my company’s Mac Mini with other Windows computers over SMB. The Mac clearly had “File Sharing” turned on, yet the Windows machines refused to see the machine, let alone the shared folders. After half a day of tinkering, I finally found the real culprit — with the help of a pile of command-line tools. This post records the whole troubleshooting process, and also gives a good rant about Windows’ junk-pile design that has only gotten messier from Win10 to Win11.

When I handed my workspace over to Multica back in May, I was happily picturing how letting AI take on more of the work would mean fewer late nights for me. The work did get done — but my token bill went through the roof. The other day I pulled a three-month usage report for the workspace out of curiosity, and I had to double-check that I was reading it right: about 38M tokens in May, jumping to nearly 500M in July, with a three-month total of 883M. So here’s a data-driven look at how my token consumption exploded over those three months — and why. Because my AI tasks have gone from “trying it out” to “can’t live without it”.