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6. I HATE the ChatGPT app. I can’t stand that the top item in the nav is an AI Slop image creator. It crashes all the time. It feels less intuitive than Claude code

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5. I love that I can start new sessions and worktrees from my phone in the GPT app. In Claude code I need to always start the new remote session from the laptop which makes it difficult when I’m not home and need to work on something new.

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4. 5.6 Sol and Terra are so fast and so cheap compared to Opus 5 and Sonnet 5, its wild

3. Opus is MUCH better at comp’ing designs. I can give it my existing design system, and it can create production ready designs. Even with my svelte component library at its disposal, everything GPT 5.6 hands me looks like a rough wireframe. I cannot get it be useful for iterating on design.

2. Part of my flow involved presenting branches of paths forward with a recommended approach that I could click on, or opt for a full text response. I mostly use these through remote control of my phone. The GPT app is incapable of rendering the multiple choice style inputs which is a little painful

1. GPT 5.6 Sol is much better at following instructions. I had a sequence of prompts I asked Opus to follow, 4.8 was always consistent, 5 stopped following instructions entirely. GPT 5.6 always follows its instructions.

Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 30/07/2026

I’m switching to Codex for the month, everyone seems to say it’s wildly better than the Anthropic models right now. My impression after a few days:

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I want to go back to this. Also, someone needs to talk me down the ledge here before I spend $1,400 on this never used minidisc player.

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 22/07/2026

Trying to think of ways to start using my A7SIII more so I can rationalize buying the FX5 in 2027

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 22/07/2026

The “ice cream” really makes me distrust whatever they’re about to tell me in this recipe.

Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 13/07/2026

I got a Surface Laptop for work, it's my first Windows machine since 2005 and... I mean... people choose to live like this?

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 03/07/2026

Today is my last day of the very generous amount of parental leave that my company gives. I’m so happy to have had the time to spend with my kid but also, honestly, devastated that this could be the last time I ever have a chance to spend this much time with him

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Also stop telling me that you're giving me the "honest" answer. Are you giving me dishonest answers every other time?

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Assuming API billing prices, these services are more expensive than a junior engineer (or two, or three, or five). You can clear $35k a month if you parallelize many streams. At that price, if someone, with that much confidence, was consistently wrong, I would fire them immediately.

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The reason for this is because when working in services, the LLM can mock and test almost everything and assert things function before coming back to you. While they can instrument playwright for frontend code, there's still so much it has zero visibility into.

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I've been working on inputs that are enhanced with WebGL flourishes for 2 days, given explicit implementation details, and it's been days of back and forth of the thing not working. "Oh, sorry, I see my mistake, this is definitely the fix" No, man, you have definitely not fixed anything.

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 23/06/2026

It's so weird how it looks like frontend is the first thing that CEOs are trying to automate away because in my experience, all frontier models are excellent at building infrastructure given a solid design, but absolutely NOTHING can get them to build out non-trivial user experiences correctly.

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My biggest regret is not buying property in New York City at the beginning of the pandemic. We just moved to San Francisco but we could’ve rented it out for seven years.

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 21/06/2026

I had Claude continuously deploy changes because I was giving it feedback from my phone and validating it from there and the first thing to give was github actions which almost immediately hit their basic paid account limit, like under a day

Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 16/06/2026

I just got rid of about 15 extra large Home Depot boxes of stuff from the house and now I feel like I have ascended corporeal plane. AMA

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 15/06/2026

You'd think with the 20x CC plan you'd be able to turn on fast mode for Opus and just consume 2x your usage?

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 15/06/2026

I know I could probably do this with DO or D1 + KV or a Container + R2 for hydration, but it would be cool if Cloudflare had a native graph storage solution

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 12/06/2026

A full week on the Claude Code 20x plan with Opus 4.8 and I went through 44% of my weekly usage limit. A day and a half on Fable 5, I've gone through 68% already. It's impressive, but I had no complaints with Opus 4.8. Being that it's going billing-only, I can probably safely stop using it now.

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 11/06/2026

The Fable 5 model has been pretty incredible, but it's noticeably much slower and is absolutely tearing through my Claude 20x plan right now. I think it's a great tool for planning and iterating on new large features, but for visiting existing work, I think I need to drop back down to Opus/Sonnet.

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I can't really understand why there's so much hyper around Vercel and not Cloudflare. Cloudflare is such an cool set of products and you can really do anything you want.

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It falls apart with UI: 1. Claude Code designs to an aesthetic, I find 2. Finessing animations, you really just need to do them by hand 3. Complex sever to client state (partial data loading, streaming). Balancing all of this while trying to maintain a decent framerate, it's just choking.

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I think LLMs are much better suited for infrastructure and services than for clients. I've been able to do some pretty amazing things with it, building out a pretty broad infrastructure on Cloudflare including identity, video transcoding, analytics and feature flagging. It's pretty incredible.

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 09/06/2026

My favorite thing about the people in San Francisco is when you’re waiting for the bus with your baby and everyone literally just steps in front of you to get on first.

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I upgraded to the Claude Code 20x plan for the month to get through some side project work, coincidentally, the first Mythos model just dropped and is available for CC plans through near the end of June before it goes to usage-only. I'd been hitting 50% of my limits, guess it's time to let it rip.

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Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 05/06/2026

I can't even imagine what a soft little boy you must be to be angered by the new God of War game. So embarrassing.

Christian de Botton @cdb.is · 02/06/2026

There isn’t much that I miss about pre-baby life. Except for going to movies. I really miss going to movies. I would love to sit in an air conditioned room with a big screen for five hours and watch Obsession and Backrooms, back to back.

Without giving away a ton, the last season of Euphoria was... so stupid. Sam Levinson threw away 2 seasons of rich character development to write a Quentin Tarantino fanfic. Complete waste of performances by Zendaya, Colman Domingo, and Jacob Elordi.

Quentinen And
Tarantined By
Writtin
Directino

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Go buy a nice pen and some good quality paper, think about what you need and want to do, and write it down.

The process also forces you to slow down and think about your day and what you actually want to accomplish. With an 8 month old, prioritization has become so much more important than it ever was. Taking the time to slow down to think about the day has also helped a lot with anxiety.

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