this was a nice read, but I have exactly one question - if you already decided on ai model to use, why go through rent-seeking middleman? why pay money to openrouter?
"Also, for those that are curious: the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22. You don’t need an expensive subscription or sell your soul to Altman or Amodei."
It feels like for RE work, Chinese models are currently the only ones that actually let you do that, because the US ones want a healthy subscription plan or an government/enterprise customer.
I did RE of two Xiaomi cameras with Opus 5.5 with zero refusals, he even connected them to frigate and set up everything I needed for local recording. And I just used the $20 subscription that I already used for other stuff, so it was effectively free work.
Love to see the deconstructive approach here, where LLMs only come into play when you're stumped and then only on that specific part. It's a good approach, it lets you get more practice instead of it all coming to a stop.
I agree, he really seemed to use it mainly to help stay on task, and be forced into unproductive rabbit holes. Great example is the function that turned out to be a float to int conversion; that has nothing really to do with what he is attempting to solve, and would be disheartening to use a bunch of effort only to find it wasted on such a mundane function.
this was a nice read, but I have exactly one question - if you already decided on ai model to use, why go through rent-seeking middleman? why pay money to openrouter?
From the author:
"Also, for those that are curious: the total cost of running the Deepseek model on OpenRouter was 22 cents. Yes, $0.22. You don’t need an expensive subscription or sell your soul to Altman or Amodei."
It feels like for RE work, Chinese models are currently the only ones that actually let you do that, because the US ones want a healthy subscription plan or an government/enterprise customer.
I did RE of two Xiaomi cameras with Opus 5.5 with zero refusals, he even connected them to frigate and set up everything I needed for local recording. And I just used the $20 subscription that I already used for other stuff, so it was effectively free work.
Love to see the deconstructive approach here, where LLMs only come into play when you're stumped and then only on that specific part. It's a good approach, it lets you get more practice instead of it all coming to a stop.
I agree, he really seemed to use it mainly to help stay on task, and be forced into unproductive rabbit holes. Great example is the function that turned out to be a float to int conversion; that has nothing really to do with what he is attempting to solve, and would be disheartening to use a bunch of effort only to find it wasted on such a mundane function.