AI Coding Field Notes

Field notes on AI coding agents — what they cost, where they break, what shipped. Every published figure (prices, percentages, multiples, token counts and durations) as JSON and CSV, each row carrying the sentence it came from.

View the Project on GitHub xyzs996/ai-coding-field-notes

AI Costs

6 of the 24 write-ups here are tagged AI Costs. Every figure quoted below is in the figures table with the sentence it came from.

AI Programming Tool Selection Strategy: From Rapid Prototyping to Long-term Collaboration

A specialized code review agent beat Claude Code on accuracy across 200 real pull requests and 50 open-source repositories while burning about one-ninth the tokens.

Choosing the Right AI Model for Coding: Cost vs. Efficiency

Fable 5, the cheapest option at $9.05 per run, delivers only 41.2% accuracy in React projects.

MonkeyCode: The Open-Source AI Coding Platform With 900 Million Free Tokens

MonkeyCode’s free tier includes 900 million tokens, deploys to your own network with 1 command, and ships as open source you can read.

The Hidden Costs of GPT-5.6 Model Selection: A Developer’s Real-World Guide

“Choosing the right GPT-5.6 model for your business is more about avoiding cost overruns than just picking the cheapest option.”

Token Optimization for Indie Developers’ AI API Bills

In July 2026, while indie developers building AI coding products full-time watched their API burn rate climb toward their revenue, a quieter shift in the Chinese developer stack showed a different…

When AI Customer Service Backfired: Klarna’s Case and the Four-Stage Path to Enterprise AI Adoption

Klarna reported $4 million a year in savings and a 99.96 percent conversation engagement rate, the kind of pair of numbers that ends an internal debate before it starts.


All 24 write-ups