AI Tools
14 posts
Three AI Stories From This Week, Read Against the Primary Documents: Grok 4.6 Doubles Its Price at 200k Tokens, Qwen3.8's License Bans No Country, and Claude's New Watermark Says It Is Not Conclusive.
I took three stories from the past 48 hours and opened the document each one is built on. xAI's launch post quotes $2 per million tokens; its pricing table doubles the rate past 200k and bills the whole request at the higher rate. A widely repeated claim says Qwen3.8's license forbids use in the US, EU, UK, and Korea; the license is sixteen lines long and contains no territory clause at all, while a different model's license does contain exactly that list. Anthropic's new watermarking is real, and Anthropic's own support page says a detected mark is not fully conclusive and a missing mark proves nothing.
ChatGPT vs Claude on the Free Plan: I Asked Both for 3D Scenes. The Second One Only Rendered on One Side.
Two prompts, two free accounts, same day. The first task was a cube in a room and both delivered something that runs, though only one of them survived losing the network. The second task was a solar system, and here the result was not close: one produced planets, orbits, an asteroid belt and a working camera, and the other produced a loading spinner that never stops. The cause was not model quality in any vague sense. It was one URL, and I can show you the exact line.
Three AI Launches in One Week. I Tried All Three Without Paying, and 'Free' Meant Three Different Things.
OpenAI moved free users to GPT-5.6 Luna, xAI shipped Grok Imagine Image 2.0, and Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max. All three were announced as things you can use at no cost. I opened all three the way a new user would. One gave me a working model but will not tell me which one. One made me sign up, then generated images fine, then put its headline feature behind a subscription. One answered me without an account and printed its model name in the header. Here is what each one actually does when you have not paid.
I Automated the AI Approval Prompt. It Missed the Same Three Commands in Every Session.
A developer published 409,000 approve/deny decisions from a browser game and reported that the average player misses 1 in 3 threats. The obvious next move is to stop asking the human. So I wrote a twenty-line filter, gave it the study's own threat taxonomy as an answer key, and ran it three times. It caught 29 of 46 threats — and the ones it waved through were the same ordinary-looking commands every session. Here are all three scorecards, the full decision log, and the one substitution that beat my filter outright.
I Checked My Claude Code Setup for Shai-Hulud. Then I Found Three of My Four Package Counts Were Wrong.
The reporting says the payload wakes up the next time someone opens the repo in VS Code or starts a Claude Code session inside it. So I ran the check on my own machine: 35 config and hook files hashed, 351 installed packages against a 79-entry list, zero matches. Then I reopened all four sources to quote them properly and found that three of the four counts in my own notes were misattributed. Here are the commands, the real output, and why a zero is not a clean bill of health.
Gemini Made Me a Video for Free. First It Asked for My Gmail.
Google's free video promotion came with a number attached: ten clips. I went looking for that counter on the screens I used and never found it. What I did find was two dialogs standing between the sidebar and the prompt box, the second one asking to connect Gmail, Calendar, and Photos. I said no, and the video generated anyway.
I Used Google Slides AI on a Free Account: 10 Minutes, 3 Slides
Google lists AI deck generation in Slides as a Business Standard or Google AI Pro feature. On my free personal account it built a three-slide deck anyway. Here's the path I took, the six minutes and forty seconds of build time, the questionnaire it ran me through first, and the prompt that got refused.
Why AI-Built Websites Look Fake: 9 Tells I Found on the Page Claude Built Me
In Part 1, one message to Claude produced a finished-looking SaaS landing page — with 12,000 invented users. Before fixing anything, I went through that exact page top to bottom and named every tell that gives it away. All nine, with screenshots.
Opus 5 vs Fable 5: The Shorter Answer Cost 28% More Tokens
I gave Opus 5 and Fable 5 the same one-line prompt: a self-playing neon brick game in one HTML file. The smaller answer cost 28% more. Here's every number.
Landing Page Anatomy: Why Every SaaS Site Has the Same 9 Sections — Dissected on the Page an AI Built Me
I can't read code, but I own a landing page an AI wrote. So I learned the first real web-design lesson: what the sections of a landing page are, why they're always in that order, and how knowing their names lets you command an AI with surgical precision. First structural edit included.
What Is Kimi K3? The Chinese AI That Just Out-Coded GPT and Claude — Explained Simply
A Chinese lab dropped an AI model last week that topped a coding leaderboard above Claude and GPT — then got so popular it stopped letting new people sign up. Here's what Kimi K3 actually is, why everyone's losing it, and whether you can use it right now (in plain English).
I Asked Claude to Build My SaaS Landing Page — No Code, No Design, Just One Message
I can't code and I can't design, so I typed one sentence into an AI chat and asked it to build a landing page for an app I made up. It handed me a full, dark-mode startup page — including 12,000 users and a 4.9-star rating for an app that has never existed. Here's exactly what I typed and what came back.
Claude Fable 5 and Sonnet 5: What Actually Changed (and Which One to Use)
Anthropic renamed its top tier and shipped a new mid-tier in the same month. Here's what's real, what's marketing, and the one pricing trap nobody's flagging.
Gamma Review: I Generated a Real Deck on the Free Plan — Here's the Honest Verdict
I ran a real presentation through Gamma's free tier — one prompt, ten slides — then came back 47 days later to check what had changed. It fills blank data with confident numbers of its own, and its own export screen warns that 3 of my 10 slides will shift in PowerPoint. Here's the honest review, with my own screenshots and pricing re-checked in August.