If this is useful, a ❤️ helps others find it. I've shipped multiple apps with AI features. My AI infrastructure cost: $0/month. Here's exactly how — every tool, every limit, every workaround. Free tier: 500 req/day (Gemini 2.5 Flash), no credit card Best for: Strong reasoning, document analysis, code debugging Get it: aistudio.google.com 2. Ollama — Local LLMs Free tier: Unlimited
If this is useful, a ❤️ helps others find it. I run both in production. Here's the real comparison — not theoretical, from actual use building developer tools. Local LLM (Ollama) Gemini API (Free) Cost $0 forever $0 (free tier) Privacy 100% local Data sent to Google Setup Install Ollama + pull model Get API key (2 min) Quality Good (7B), Great (70B) Excellent Speed Fast if model lo
What if your Kubernetes cluster simply refused to run unsigned images? I spent some time experimenting with enforcing image provenance in a small Kubernetes setup using MicroK8s. The idea was simple: Only container images with valid cryptographic signatures are allowed to run in the cluster. For this I used: GitLab CI/CD (build + signing pipeline) Cosign / Sigstore (image signing) Kyverno (admissi
If this is useful, a ❤️ helps others find it. I debug Rust and TypeScript code daily. I've used all three major AI APIs for this — Gemini, Claude, and GPT-4. Here's the honest comparison for code debugging specifically. Not benchmarks. Actual use. I ran the same 5 bugs through each model: A Rust borrow checker error with async context A React state update causing infinite re-render An Android logc
Most teams I have worked with have one auth test in their suite. It looks like this: test('valid token verifies', () => { const token = signSync({ sub: 'user-1', aud: 'api://backend' }, secret); const result = verify(token, options); expect(result.valid).toBe(true); }); That test is fine. It is also a smoke test, not a regression suite. It catches the case where verification is completely b
The on-call alert at 02:14 said auth_5xx_rate spiked from 0.01 to 31.4. Not a deploy window. Not a traffic spike. Just thirty-one percent of authenticated requests failing for ~four minutes, then back to baseline. The cause was a JWKS rotation on the issuer side. New keys came in. Old keys went out. Caches in our service didn't refresh fast enough. Tokens signed with the new key were rejected beca
If this is useful, a ❤️ helps others find it. I've shipped 7 Mac apps in the past year. Every AI feature in them runs on free tools. Here's the exact stack — what I use, why, and where the limits are. What: Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview via REST API Cost: Free tier — 500 requests/day, no credit card Use for: Log diagnosis, document analysis, text classification, anything needing strong reasoning The fr
If this is useful, a ❤️ helps others find it. Everything I keep looking up when building with Gemini — in one place. Model Context Best for gemini-2.5-flash-preview 1M tokens General use, thinking, fast gemini-2.5-pro-preview 1M tokens Complex reasoning, best quality gemini-1.5-flash 1M tokens Stable, production-ready gemini-1.5-pro 2M tokens Longest context gemini-2.0-flash-lite 1M