Is a Consumer AI Agent Worth It? $550 Saved, $64 Wasted
Wired's consumer AI agent trial audited. $550 saved, $64 wasted, with per-task economics, failure modes, security risks, and the adopt-versus-build call.
PastAGI
Practical AI guides, honest tool reviews, engineering deep dives, real-world use cases, and sharp analysis that cuts through the hype.
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AI Agents vs Workflows? Count Your Branches First
AI agents vs workflows: enumerate your branches, price each runtime decision point, and promote to an agent only when the branches can't be known ahead.
Pass@k Crossover Tests Tell You When to Ship the Base Model
Pass@k crossovers show RLVR sharpens rather than adds capability. Learn the decision rule and statistical test that find your model's crossover point.
Googlebook for AI Development, Judged by Two Numbers
Is the Googlebook for AI development worth $899? The memory capacity and bandwidth math says cloud client. We compare MacBook local models and API paths.
Entity Deduplication From 50 Million Pairs to Thousands
Entity deduplication for builders: normalize, hash, and block before embeddings, calibrate thresholds without labels, and account for cost at every stage.
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash vs Gemini Flash Real Cost per Task
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash vs Gemini Flash, normalized to dollars per multimodal task across audio and video billing units, tool loops, and self-host math.
The Claude OpenAI Security Incident, Decoded for Builders
The Claude OpenAI security incident marks the first widely reported offensive chain by a shipping model. Learn the threat model and what to harden.
Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking Needs a Latency Budget
Gemini 3.8 Live extended thinking adds reasoning time to a realtime voice agent. The latency-budget math tells you when it helps and when it is dead air.
LLM Prompt Caching Can Cut Input Costs Up to 90%
LLM prompt caching can cut agent loop input costs up to 90%. Compare OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Bedrock on TTLs, breakpoints, and real savings math.
Open Weights vs Frontier Models Is a 4.4 Month Call
The open weights vs frontier models gap has closed to 4.4 months at roughly 3x the cost. Here is the math that decides which workloads justify the premium.
Async GRPO Training on Serverless GPUs Cuts RL Cost
Async GRPO training with LoRA swaps NCCL for a bucket and proxy, turning RL fine-tuning from reserved-cluster spend into elastic spot-GPU economics.
AI Agent Monitoring Beyond the Dashboard
AI agent monitoring fails when dashboards track requests, not resolutions. This taxonomy maps silent failure modes to the signals that catch them.