opencode's free tier got cut off from external calls

2026-09-17 12:12

opencode's free tier got cut off from external calls So opencode's free tier got cut off from external calls. That's a bigger problem than it sounds, because a lot of open source stuff had opencode free wired in as a backend, Hermes agent being one of the popular ones. Not just the reverse proxy people grumbling about it either. Plenty of agent users are in the same boat. I read through what everyone's doing about it. The no-auth free models are all dead. What people say actually works: make a bunch of international workbuddy accounts with alias emails and rotate them through an IP pool to keep pulling from the free hy-4 model. Or just pay for the cheap gpt-5.6-luna. 100 credits per account per month, 30 of them refunded every day, so if your IP pool is big enough you'll never burn through them.

Cloud PCs are a solid way to test stuff.

All I have is a MacBook, and my product is a Windows app. Before this, testing meant either an ARM Windows VM or an hour at an internet cafe with an x86 machine. Cloud PCs are mature enough now that it doesn't matter, and they're cheap. Roughly 1-2 RMB an hour, which makes them handy for testing or remote dev.

2026-09-18

Claude just did the same with Chat and Cowork

ChatGPT merged Chat and Codex into one entry point. Claude just did the same with Chat and Cowork. So you don't have to think about whether you want a chat or a task anymore. Describe what you need in the chat and the agent works it out on its own, whether that means running something long, calling tools, or handing you the finished thing. Claude Docs is out too, for writing documents together. Multiple people can work on them, and you can export to Word, PDF, or Google Docs. Then there's Claude Slides, which generates decks you can edit and present, and it exports to PPT.

2026-09-17

Claude appeal rejected.

Won't refund the subscription either. I'm half convinced the appeal email is itself phishing, because I'm pretty sure they log the IP. DHH came to Shenzhen recently and showed how he uses Claude Code over there. That's the safest way now, honestly: run Claude Code on an overseas machine, connect through Tailscale, never use it locally. So I need to rent an overseas box with a residential IP, and register and log into Claude there.

2026-11-14

Sharing my current mobile only workflow.

Until late September it was the usual setup: parked in front of my laptop, terminal open, bossing pi around, fanning out subagents, then eyeballing diffs myself and filing the PR. Glued to the chair all day, every day. Late September I moved the whole thing to my phone, Hermes runs the show, pi takes the orders. My back is very grateful. Three weeks in, still no regrets. Stack: Hermes on flagship brains (gpt-6-astra / opus-5.5), pi on mid-tier (ds-v4.1-flash / sonnet / terra) with as few plugins as possible, the two talking over a2a. Hermes reads the issues, slices them into small tasks, spins up a worktree for each one, and dispatches a pi into it. When a pi finishes it pings Hermes, who decides: ship the PR or bounce it back for rework. I get back from a full day of being a tourist, or just wake up, and a dozen PRs are sitting there done. Pretty sweet. The catch is how black-box the whole thing is. My emotional arc has been a rerun of early vibe coding, except back then I at least read the diffs. Now even that goes to a flagship model. Boxes all the way down. If you don't have data anxiety, grok-bot and chatgpt-dot basically ship this out of the box, grok-cli and codex built in, native agent-to-agent comms. Downside: your code lives on their servers, everything's moderated, and one ban takes it all with it.

2026-11-14