Random Thoughts — July 10

July 10, 2026 Rens Jaspers Short thoughts AI Money Workflow LLM
  • I burned through around €100 of Sol and Fable in a few hours. The quality was good, but it is expensive.
  • AI development sometimes feels pay-to-win. When I deliver better work, I have usually also spent more money.
  • It often feels like I am treating people to tokens. Colleagues ask me questions for free, and sometimes I can literally forward those questions to an agent. LMGTFY.
  • Agent loops get expensive quickly. Because of that, I run fewer loops than I would like. I can stay within budget by using Composer 2.5 to process incoming messages, but I would prefer GPT-5.6 Sol for that level of work.
  • Today, AI was mostly about money.

Some positive notes:

  • More and more often, I am learning from my agents instead of the other way around. That is one of the things I enjoy about working with increasingly capable models.
  • I had Sol buy and configure a private Hetzner server. My laptop will become a thin client, while the Linux server does the heavy work. I am looking forward to the performance boost.
  • I had some great brainstorming sessions with GPT Live. Conversations now feel surprisingly natural because the agent can respond in real time and occasionally take a moment to think by delegating to a smarter model. I cannot wait until it gets access to all my development and work tools, so I can spend less and less time behind a computer.