Alexandra’s and Dmitry’s adventure with AI
The strength and weakness of modern LLMs is their non-deterministic nature. Even the same task can be solved in different ways by the same model, resulting in different costs. However, organizations still need to plan and forecast AI budgets. And this is what I set out to test how much can be estimated in [ ]
From individual developers running out of tokens on a daily basis to Uber famously burning through the yearly budget in just four months, AI cost in both tokens and dollars is at the center of attention. Even for those who are happy with their AI subscriptions, the API-equivalent cost matters. Once you max out subscription [ ]
Choosing the right AI model is now a well-recognized problem. It is still not trivial, but at least there are benchmarks, pricing pages, context-window comparisons, and plenty of public discussion to guide you. Coding agents are still more of a wild west. Many people treat them as simple wrappers around the model: a chat window [ ]
My husband and I started experimenting with AI about six months ago. Since we were both on a career break, we were careful about spending. So we set a strict rule no more than $100 per month on anything AI-related: APIs, tools, subscriptions, all of it. I wasn’t trying to analyze the costs at [ ]
While I was focusing my own experiments on AI as a service and paid APIs, my husband went in a completely different direction. He’s been running models locally on his Mac, and getting results surprisingly close to what I was seeing with OpenA, but without the cost. He put together a guide on how to [ ]
This is a story about a failed attempt, not a successful one. In my previous post, I promised to talk about fine tuning and how it didn’t work for the Virtual Alexandra project, a chatbot based on my own writing and instructions. My husband and I called fine tuning results “Drunk Alexandra” incoherent answers [ ]
Not long ago, I created Virtual Alexandra, a chatbot that answers questions based on my writing and instructions. The final implementation turned out to be so simple that even someone with no AI or coding experience can create their own virtual self. If you are brave enough to look at yourself in this peculiar mirror, [ ]
After a holiday break full of travel and family affairs, I am finally back to blogging. Since my silence was longer than I expected, I decided to introduce a new project right away. Say hi to Virtual Alexandra. Virtual Alexandra is a chatbot that uses OpenAI (gpt-5.2 at the moment) to answer questions based on [ ]
Now that I had the game stabilized and feature-complete, it was time for code review. I decided to do a first pass with AI coding tools and then ask the architect (aka my husband) to give his verdict. To make the post easier to follow, I am finally going to share my code. Just keep [ ]
The beauty of the diary blog is that I keep making new discoveries while writing my posts. And so I updated my mini LOTR-themed adventure game once again. With the new version, you don’t need to wait 30 seconds for each step anymore the content will start showing up in less than one second. [ ]