If Fable is "delegating" tasks, then there's actually an agent front end of whatever you think the API is.

We have a local instance of Qwen-3.6 which is more than adequate for running agents. You can mix and match local and cloud-hosted models. (My biggest use case for local models right now is vision models because they're quite small and I can avoid some data-locality issues my customers wouldn't be comfortable with if I sen them to a Chinese model.)

Anthropic has been surprisingly successful at convincing them that they should control frontier models because they're so dangerous that... only Anthropic can be trusted with them.

(If they're really so dangerous, the right way to deal with them is through a democratic process and taking them out of the hands of a for-profit private entity.)

Cursor's $20 a month plan provides a reasonable amount of Opus tokens as well.

That seems to be what most of these projects that get accused of being "vibe coded" are doing. Incidentally - there's nothing wrong with writing your own useful utilities, and educational to package these up for distribution/release, but don't be surprised if not another soul in the world finds the particular need you had to be one they share.

Deprecating really old stuff is fine.

DeepSeek-V4-Pro is adequate plus use DS4-Flash for tasks or other small activity you’d use Haiku or Sonnet for. Go sign up with $10 prepaid.

OpenCode Go - go sign up with $5 for a month and use Qwen-3.7-Max for design/plan/architecture or difficult troubleshooting. Feels closer to Opus 3.6 or 3.7 than DeepSeek, closest I’ve found.

OpenAI Codex, $20 a month plan, use GPT-5.5 via API for the same design/plan/architecture/troubleshooting/author commits. (You can also pay $100 and cut and paste really difficult problems into chat with the GPT-5.5-Pro model.)

Xiaomi MiMo-2.5-Pro, find a friend to give you a $2 referral code, you get 72 cents free. Same pricing as DeepSeek. Somewhere between Sonnet and Opus, quite capable. Apply for the UltraSpeed beta too.

You can switch in and out from these models on the fly in OpenCode or ohmypi and simply find the one that feels best to you. I use CodexBar to watch consumption in near real time.

For a casual user or someone new to programming, Cursor’s $20 plan is an excellent start with Composer-2.5 and Composer-2.5-Fast. You get an API allowance too you can use to access Opus-4.x or GPT-5.5-Pro from OpenCode or ohmypi in addition to Cursor itself.

Finally, if you use Grok or Twitter, SuperGrok at $30 a month has a good vision model, which I used for automated testing of front ends. I’m migrating to locally-run Qwen-3-VL on a commodity Mac, though. If you’re less technical unreach makes hosting local models on a Mac easy.

If you have a powerful GPU like an RTX 5090, try Qwen-3.6 locally on that too. Use ollama or llama-swap which is fairly easy to use.

I have not tried new Kimi yet but we have been able to keep our costs at or below $200 a month per employee with a team of 3 professional developers, 1 graphic designer who uses a lot of Midjourney and Grok Imagine now driven from workflows she made herself in ohmypi, and 1 nontechnical user (account manager / project manager) who uses ohmypi to help her gather requirements and track implementation of them. With a tiny bit of effort we could get that number closer to $75 per employee per month.

(Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.)

They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.

I am not remotely pro-CCP but I think we need to acknowledge they are doing better than we are in some of these areas.

My grandma who worked at an insurance office was likewise the same. They all got sick days, although it was a point of pride to hardly ever use them.

None of them were remotely upper class. My one side might have been middle class before the depression, though. The other side was so poor that it didn't make a big difference when the depression happened.

They worked in those jobs from WWII until they retired, longer than 30 years.

They were able to ensure their children went to college, except for one who enlisted in the Navy instead. And then they helped all of their children buy their own houses, eventually. They saved a lot and built big savings for retirement when rates were high in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Their children all have a Master's degree; their grandchildren all have a Bachelor's, one has a Master's, one has an M.D., so upward mobility really did exist back then. (The grandparents of my cousins were all solidly working class as well.)