Is spending (metered money) even worth it? Perhaps for most I mean "beyond like a 30 bucks a month," but for me I'm literally not spending more money beyond my very cheapo 16gb video card.

No clue what y'all are doing, perhaps because I'm hobbying, and also I'm old and can perhaps do more of this by hand.

But I'm basically just doing what I did before, plus ollama self hosted and sometimes gemini and I feel like I'm going lightspeed beyond what I've ever done.

And I suppose this is still very fine-grained. I have it make a draft, then just have them fix/change it step by step?

I tried one of the bigger boys that can one-shot apps, which I guess is cool, but I'm finding it's just as hard to modify as if I just grabbed someone elses repo on github.

No, I have the same experience. Feels crazy that a GPU is too expensive and then the advice is to spend 400$+tokens on openrouter each month.