For side projects I pretty much exclusively use Luna xhigh. The $20/mo plan with the recent generous resets is more than enough for me. Sometimes I reach the 5hr limit, but haven't reached the weekly limit yet.

The most recent project it finished was a SIP client for an ESP32 in-wall touch panel that I got from AliExpress for $50. It rings when someone is at my doorbell and let's me answer calls and see video. Yes an ESP32 can stream H.264 video :D

My only complaint with Luna is it seems to give up when the work is half finished, and I often need to tell it to continue. But I feel this is mainly a harness problem. I just use it in ChatGPT/Codex as it gives me easy remote access to check in on what it's doing.

(At my dayjob I usually spend $200+/day with Opus/Fable)

Unfortunately ChatGPT just stopped allowing people to upgrade to the $200/mo subscription.

I started my first paid subscription ($100/mo) last week, and now I want to upgrade and I can't :-(

With everything changing it's great to hear others have the same workflow. I added a snapshot step so I'm doing

plan, generate step 1, review, snapshot, generate step 2, review, snapshot...

That way I have a chance to diff with the previous iteration and clean up comments, modify skills, etc. also if it bonks on a step I'm one snapshot away from trying again...

Is there a place people share their workflows other than HN comments?

Could you elaborate on your exact setup? Where do you run these models?

Qwen3.8 is all you need.

I just tell everyone to use Fable 5.1 for everything at this point. Astra is unfortunately a dud, I'm sure they will try to fix a bunch of it with GPT-6.1 but OAI has had this issue for awhile now where every other generation has some sort of strange tic, or reward hacking issue, or something. It's almost like they are balancing the RL on the tip of a needle.

Opus 5 has issues too, comment-slop, claude-ish, etc.

5.1 on the other hand can seemingly do no wrong. Easy to work with, writes human-level code. Expensive, yes, but even at Low effort it's well worth it.

I disagree; I just spent 15x dogfooding some Claude setup I rolled out to the org making changes that would have cost me less then a dollar had I used Luna and I would have got the same, if not better results; better because it would have been faster so I could have iterated more.

Use of closed models is unprofessional, and depending on your field negligent. The fact that it has been widely normalized does not make it less so.

You're handing over your (presumably your customer/employers) data to an unaccountable third party which has demonstrated itself willing to commit criminal acts, and to take other people's data without permission. Your ability to continue to perform this work can be withdrawn at any time for any (or no) reason. You have little ability to validate that the work is being performed as expected and isn't being silently nerfed or outright subverted based on competitive considerations, bribes, overactive 'safety', or cost management.

Outsourcing to a black box would be a reasonable expectation if you asked a non-professional to perform the work. A professional should be able to account for the tools they use.

Astra is quite crap (enters reasoning loops like Gemini used to and fails to actually work on a task - would say yes this needs fixing, so I say go ahead and then it will spend half an hour coming back with yes this needs fixing and not doing any fix) and Fable/Opus unusable in many instances (they struggle to generate coherent English let alone code).

Out of these only Sol is quite useful - actually finishes a task, though you need to interrupt often as it likes to wander into its comfort zone.

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