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.

I had already managed to get claude-science running in a container, and basic functionality worked without major issues. But when I wanted to do things like molecular docking, I couldn’t—the container simply had no GPU. However, when I pulled NVIDIA’s official image to build the container the same way I had before, something bizarre happened: every language kernel in CS—Python, Perl, R—stopped working, and the entire runtime environment was rendered useless.

This was truly beyond my understanding. After consulting Gemini manually with no luck, I decided to let opencode + deepseek-v4-flash handle it on its own—not me remotely typing commands and directing it, but an AI agent living inside the container that read the logs, bisected parameters, decompiled the parser, and edited the entrypoint itself. It was a strange and interesting experience; here’s a record of it.

Looking back, I learned to use FrontPage to create web pages since elementary school, but except for GitHub Pages, I never really set up and operated my own website. However, now it’s possible. With the support of agents and SaaS services, creating and launching a website has become quite simple…

The Lunar New Year holiday is supposed to be a time for lying back, watching videos, and playing games. However, as a dedicated workhorse programmer, how could I possibly let myself stay idle? So, during the break, I tinkered with opencode + MiniMax/Deepseek and came up with a few little things (definitely not because I got utterly wrecked in Street Fighter on New Year’s Eve and needed a distraction).

The new year has brought another AI surprise…