Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. One scorecard, three hidden variables. In its 21 September 2026 launch announcement, xAI positioned Grok 4.7 as an upgrade for coding and knowledge work at the same list price and context class as Grok 4.6. …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Open weights just changed the math. The cost argument for GLM-5.3-Flash is not that open weights are inherently better than GPT-6 Astra. It is that high-volume agents with long, repeated contexts now have a much …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Until November 12 the picker still has GPT. After that you bring a key or you leave. For most of the last two years, AI labs behaved like they were building a commons. Ship a …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Five practical configurations for faster prefix reuse, lower time-to-first-token, and more responsive agent workloads. Your agent sends a 2,000-token system prompt on every request. Your inference server recomputes the KV activations for those 2,000 tokens …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. DeepSeek’s ‘discount’ will cost you 4x more. Here’s how to fight back. Before August 16, 2026, DeepSeek-V4-Pro output cost a flat $0.87 per million tokens. After August 16, the cheapest version of that same output, …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent: the Honest Comparison Nobody’s Given You Yet Peter Steinberger built the first version of what became OpenClaw in about an hour. A WhatsApp bot, a few tools bolted on, pushed to …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. How DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s hybrid sparse attention and MoE design deliver near-frontier agentic coding at a fraction of GPT and Claude’s API cost Twenty-eight cents. That’s what a million output tokens costs on DeepSeek-V4-Flash. The same volume …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Becoming a Top 1% Hermes Agent User: The Complete Playbook No One Else Is Sharing Three weeks into running Hermes Agent on a $5 VPS, I opened my terminal and it told me something I …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Sonnet 5 launched with a promotional rate of $2/$10 per MTok that expires August 31, 2026 The Sonnet 5 Price is Not What You Think It Is Sonnet 5 priceThe article explains that Sonnet 5’s …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. A practical guide to Grok 4.5’s agent loop, reasoning_effort, context pricing cliff, and Grok Build. What the docs don’t spell out clearly. I burned about four dollars in a single afternoon last week. Same 40-step …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Pi: The Coding Agent Built by Someone Who Got Fed up With Claude Code Mario Zechner liked Claude Code. Then he watched it get worse in a way that’s specific to how agent tools tend …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. A practical guide to the 10 concepts behind deploying open-weight LLMs in production: licensing, quantization, serving engines, and observability. Fifty engineers start using your new internal assistant on launch day. The first ten get answers …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. OpenCode vs. Grok Build vs. Claude Code: which open coding agent should you actually build on Three terminal-native coding agents, three different bets. OpenCode wagers on model freedom, Grok Build on parallel sub-agents, Claude Code …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. MiniMax M3, GLM-5.2, and Kimi K3 compared on VRAM, license, and agent-loop latency: the real decision tree for self-hosting an open-weight coding model i A team I know spent an entire sprint provisioning an 8-GPU …

Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. I Self-Hosted Langfuse so My LLM Traces Would Stop Living On Someone Else’s Bill We crossed 100K traces a month in March. That’s the point where Langfuse Cloud’s Pro tier stops feeling like a rounding …