Watercolor: a scale balancing a price tag on one side and a cache symbol on the other, representing the trade-off between cost and efficiency

Day 9: API Caching Basics and Why Unit Price Isn't the Whole Story

This is Day 9 of Week 2 in the “AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide.” You should have completed Day 7 Exercise: Add Error Handling to Your Script first. Day 7 added error handling to your script, so it’s resilient now. But there’s a bigger cost factor you might have missed: the API provider you picked could cost a lot more than you think. DeepSeek V4-Pro charges $0.435 per million input tokens. OpenAI GPT-5.5 charges $5.00. That’s roughly an 11.5x difference. Factor in caching and the gap widens further. ...

2026-06-30 · 7 min · Alex Wang

omo vs oms: Fallback Chains Deep Dive

This is Part 2 of When Your AI Coding Tool Needs Three Configs. Part 1 covered the config design, file structure, and orchestration philosophy. This article focuses on fallback mechanisms. omo = oh-my-openagent, oms = oh-my-opencode-slim. Model and provider names are anonymized as provider-a/model-x etc. Why Bother Understanding Fallback omo and oms both support fallback: automatic switching to backup when the primary model is unavailable. But their mechanisms differ completely: omo is a multi-layer pipeline that degrades step by step; oms uses startup model selection + runtime abort retry. You need to understand this difference to configure a reliable chain. ...

2026-06-07 · 13 min · Alex Wang

When Your AI Coding Tool Needs Three Configs

Why I Need Three OpenCode Configs I have three opencode.json files in my ~/.config/opencode/ directory. The reason is simple: I wanted to run oh-my-openagent (omo from here on) and oh-my-opencode-slim (oms from here on) side by side, comparing them to understand where each one’s boundaries lie. omo is the full version—it comes with a batch of built-in agents (Sisyphus, Atlas, Prometheus, Oracle, Explore, Librarian, Metis, Momus, etc.), plus the ones I register on demand. The core is the fallback chain and the Sisyphus orchestrator: throw a refactoring task at Sisyphus, and it breaks the task down for Prometheus to plan, Atlas to execute the plan and distribute subtasks, Explore to search code, Oracle to analyze, then Sisyphus aggregates the results. oms is the slim version—it also has an orchestrator as the main agent responsible for executing tasks, but the difference is in the review phase: oms uses council multi-model consensus, where multiple councillors review results in parallel, and the Council agent synthesizes outputs from all councillors to reach a final conclusion. ...

2026-06-05 · 10 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor: chat bubbles dissolving into a token stream flowing into a notebook and brass key on a desk

AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide (1): Your First API Call

TL;DR: This is Part 1 of the “AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide” series. Four parts total, one per week of practice. This article takes you from chat windows to APIs, automating your AI interactions through code, laying the foundation for batch processing and autonomous task-execution AI. Introduction: From “I Ask AI” to “Programs Ask AI” If you finished the L0→L1 graduation checklist, you might remember one line from the graduation post: “Register for an API account and use Python to print your first AI reply.” Today is that day. ...

2026-06-01 · 12 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor illustration: three artisan tools on a warm wooden workbench: a wide terracotta bowl, an elegant glass carafe, and a segmented wooden organizer, each suited for different tasks, no ranking implied

Pick Your AI by the Job, Not the Ranking

Tried ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek… and still can’t decide which one to stick with? Here’s the thing: that’s the wrong question. There is no universally best AI, only the one that fits what you’re doing right now. What’s your scenario? “I want a general-purpose assistant for everything” → ChatGPT. As of May 2026 the default is GPT-5.5, well-rounded, with the richest plugin ecosystem. If you pick just one, this is a solid choice. ...

2026-05-15 · 1 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor illustration: a person at a cozy desk, holding a glowing translucent orb representing the essence of understanding LLMs

AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide (1): Understanding Your Tools

📖 This is Part 1 of 5 in the “AI Path L0→L1 Upgrade Guide” series. Series navigation will be updated once all parts are published. Introduction: Sound Familiar? I’ve watched a lot of friends use AI tools, and I keep noticing the same pattern. They’re not strangers to ChatGPT or Claude, using them casually from time to time, but their experience is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes the AI delivers a jaw-dropping answer; other times it completely misses the point, producing something unusable. ...

2026-05-11 · 5 min · Alex Wang