
Cloud PCs are a solid way to test stuff.

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Speed wins. The free models in opencode are working again.
Someone actually had it fixed the same night and opened a PR. Then the 9router author pushed an update. No clue whether he merged the PR or rewrote it by hand, but opencode free works fine on the new version. OpenCode's free models only talk to their official client now. 9router's fix is fingerprint spoofing.

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.

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.

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.
