A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

Two weeks ago I ended a post about rate limits with "Ollama is back." I had re-subscribed monthly on purpose, to answer the question properly this time: does this plan give me the flexibility I did not have the first time around? I have the answer now, and it is no. I cancelled. The short version is that the money ran out early. The longer version is the reason for this post: even while the money lasted, the plan was not the real cost. The real cost was how many review rounds it took to get the work to a state I could merge. The Money Part Ollama Pro is $20 a month and includes $60 of cloud usage. This is my dashboard today: The $60 was gone within the first week of the month. When I saw the reset was still three weeks away, I cancelled. Most of the requests went to kimi-k2.7-code , the model I said in the last post I had not evaluated yet. I evaluated it. For comparison, my Claude weekly limit has covered most of this past week of daily work across two apps, and i...

This came from a post I saw on X. Somebody wanted a different watch face for their Garmin, sat down with Claude, and had one working in short order. I had thought about doing that for a long time. Like most new things, I was hesitant, because it meant stepping out of my comfort zone. It turned out to be easy with the help of AI. After about an hour of fiddling with it, I had a working watch face. I almost wish I had jumped on it earlier in the week, because I bought a watch face a few days ago and was very disappointed with it. The face is Ridgeline : big time, a ring that fills toward my step goal, heart rate, steps, battery. Getting Started Was the Part I Dreaded Writing for a watch is its own little world. There is a language I had never used, a set of tools I did not have installed, and a way of getting the finished thing onto the watch that I had never done. That stack of unfamiliar steps is exactly what had kept me from trying. The agent handled all of it. It set up the ...

In July I wrote that monthly plans beat paying by the token for my development work. I also mentioned getting only three or four working days before hitting the weekly limit. What I understated was how much that limit would start deciding my schedule, and which model reviewed my code. A $20 monthly plan sounds like a month of work. In practice the weekly limit decides how much of that month you actually get, and for me the answer was about three working days. Then I waited. Not for an hour, not until midnight, but for the reset, which is most of a week away when you hit the wall on a Wednesday. Three Days, Then Waiting The plan was Ollama Pro, monthly. Twenty dollars, and on paper that is a bargain next to what the same work costs through an API key. The weekly ceiling is what broke it. I would get through roughly three days of real work and spend the rest of the week unable to do the thing I was paying for. Waiting is worse than it sounds, because the work does not pause polit...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I am the only user of my personal assistant app, so every issue in its tracker is one I filed after watching something fail on my own phone. That sentence is no longer true. My daughter started using it, and she found a limitation I had built in so deeply that I could not see it. Before that, though, some numbers. The app is at version 6.5.0, build 191, with 115 release notes behind it. It is 245 Dart files in lib and 234 test files. The lib/services directory alone holds 124 services. I bring this up because people who ask me about building their own assistant usually think of it as a weekend project - a chat box with an API key behind it. The chat box was the weekend. Everything after that is the reason the thing is actually useful. Three things moved it from a toy to something I open every day: it learns from its own mistakes, it accepts the way people actually talk, and it can look at a photo. Everything else is plumbing, and I will be hone...