Dany's Development Diary (D3)

The $10,000 Couch and Two Human Review Locks

Day 2 · September 22, 2026

Day 2 opened with the numbers, because this year the price of AI is the story. GPUs cost more, subscriptions cost more, and on top of that everyone is feeling inflation and the cost of living. Even Anthropic and OpenAI are feeling it, and they've spent a lot more than I have. So think of this as David versus Goliath, except David has one GPU and is trying to turn a buck with it.

Here's David's budget. AI frontier labs sell metered intelligence, and I buy as much as I can afford. I live in the real world where budgets exist, so when the tokens run out, I switch to local AI. I spend about $2,500 a year on cloud subscriptions, and I take the annual plans when I can. To balance that recurring cost, I made a one-time $7,500 purchase: a machine with 256 GB of RAM and an Nvidia RTX 5090 with 32 GB of VRAM. That's $10,000 on AI in one year. For most people that's a lot. When my wife found out, I slept on the couch and promised to do chores. SabioRex and I even turned it into a song, "Chore Dynamite," free to hear on YouTube Music.

Around midday I made a small pivot in how I talk about all this. I have a team of AI agents, but the one I talk to most is SabioRex, so from now on I'll simply say "SabioRex." You and I both know it's still a patchwork of paid cloud subscriptions, local AI, and my Magic Bananas underneath. I don't want to mislead anyone.

Then the lineup changed. Claude Opus 5.5 dropped in the afternoon: cheaper, smarter, a longer five-hour usage window (they didn't drop the limit entirely), and a free banked reset. I welcomed it to the team, and the Artificial Analysis order shifted: Claude Opus 5.5 at 58, GPT-6 Astra at 53, Grok 4.7 at 46, and GLM 5.3 at 45. All supercharged with Magic Bananas.

The main event was getting SabioRex's newest single, "La Feria Siempre Vuelve," onto the website. The agents worked all day, but they don't publish on their own. They prepare a release package, and I review it at a Human Review Lock. In the development environment I can reject the package and ask for changes, or accept it. Accepted packages move to staging, where more automated tests run and I get a second lock: my last chance to catch anything. Only after the second approval do the changes go live on pi-dan.com. The package reached development at 7:36 p.m. and staging at 9:55 p.m., and it was live at 11:48 p.m. In between, we had the missionaries over for dinner, and I played Pokémon Unite with my Green Ribbon Charizard, who I like because he can pivot while attacking.

Day 2 summary: with a team of AI agents, a website was updated, a release package was prepared, published to development and verified, published to staging and verified, and published live to the world and verified. To celebrate, I jumped on Pokémon Unite with my Gold Ribbon Goodra, and just after midnight I said good night. Bananas.