
Stop paying for every LLM: My $0 AI toolkit
From local LM Studio to cloud-based Hermes: How I keep building when Claude Code credits run out.
I write weekly for data scientists and engineers building with AI tools and coding agents.
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From local LM Studio to cloud-based Hermes: How I keep building when Claude Code credits run out.

Step-by-step guide on setting up Hermes + Telegram on your cloud VM from part 1.

How to get a free-tier cloud VM you can SSH into and leave running 24/7.

Honest look at my always-on Hermes on a $0 cloud virtual machine + NVIDIA API free tier

I wanted to try Hermes without paying for Portal, so I pointed the agent at NVIDIA's free API tier instead.

Diagnose knowledge vs behavior failures, then choose prompting, retrieval, or training

0% → 83% correctly classified banking support messages: fine-tune a small LLM to classify customer intent.

SFT, LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, RLHF & GRPO: what each acronym means and how to pick the right fine-tuning method from the labels you already have.

When LLM fine-tuning beats prompting and RAG and when to skip it

Session fixes for false progress, doom loops, and instruction drift in Claude Code and Cursor (after re-prompting made my stuck sessions worse).

When the agent says it made a fix but your app still breaks: a clear read on Cursor, Claude Code, and what the session is really doing.

Six techniques matched to six failure modes, including inconsistent output formats, shallow reasoning, instruction drift, and more.

What works today with Google AI Edge Gallery, what breaks first on real devices, and how to pick a model your phone can actually handle

What I learned at PyCon and from my own RAG failures

A practical system: ship a live MVP, iterate from user feedback, and learn only what blocks you

Interactive explainer on the query loop, ingestion vs retrieval, configs, deploy for my AI assistant I'm presenting at PyCon Austria.

Paste-ready CLAUDE.md template, settings.json deny list with reasoning, path-scoped UI rules, two custom /project: commands

Common AI-generated code failure modes (authorization, CSRF, prompt injection) and the paste-ready agent rules to guard against all of them.

Sixteen Claude Code slash commands for the model context window, planning, diffs, and spend

I've built 10+ AI projects. Only 2 are still running. Here's what I'd do differently.