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

Indie Development

9 of the 24 write-ups here are tagged Indie Development. Every figure quoted below is in the figures table with the sentence it came from.

1.6 Billion Free Tokens Is a Compression Ratio, Not a Strategy

OmniRoute aggregates 237 providers and advertises roughly 1.6 billion free tokens a month, and that figure is arithmetic rather than a promotion, because the RTK+Caveman layer compresses 10,000 tok…

AI Agent Loop Engineering: Karpathy’s Method for 5x Productivity Gains

A developer in China’s AI community achieved 5x productivity gains using loop engineering, reducing MVP development time from four prompt tuning sessions to a single command installation.

Beyond Token Pricing: How Indie Devs Should Really Evaluate AI Model Costs

Microsoft’s evaluation of Kimi K3 landed on a number that should change how you read a pricing page: about 60 percent of the cost difference between models comes from the thinking depth a task requ…

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.

From AI Demo to Product: Loop Engineering for Indie Devs

The agent processes 40-plus podcast channels overnight, transcribed and summarized, ready to read by morning.

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 AI Branding Revolution: How Indie Developers Are Ditching Design Costs with AI

Chris launched WiseMindAI last year and came out of a single session with Miora’s brand visual template holding more than ten finished assets, covering color schemes, typography and social graphics…

Why Pi’s 1000-Token Agent Engine Needs a Sandbox Before You Touch It

Pi’s system prompt and its 4 tool descriptions come to under 1,000 tokens, which is the whole reason to like it.

Why Your Indie App Needs Short-Form Video Marketing (And How to Get Started)

The videos run about 60 seconds.


All 24 write-ups