stafford williamslinks from April 2025
Chain-of-Vibes by Pete Hodgson sums up nicely the approach I take to leverage the power of agentic AI workflows while sidestepping the limitations. Treat the tools “like weirdly knowledgeable, hyper-productive junior engineers”, give enough context but otherwise limit their output. Importantly, review the outcome of each small task and make a decision:
A) Accept and commit
B) Prompt to adjust
C) Manually fix up
D) Revert and re-prompt
The last item is an important one that’s often overlooked - throwing away the result and fixing your prompt is often more time efficient, especially when learning how to prompt.
Prompting has deceptive simplicity. It seems like it should be straight forward but for me it’s required a lot of practice to get better results. Aidan Boyd’s post How I talk to AI has a good summary of how he thinks about prompting before doing so.
Google releases Gemini 2.5 Flash allowing developers to switch between reasoning/non-reasoning at the API level.
$0.15/1mil tokens input
$0.60/1mil tokens output (no reasoning)
$3.50/1mil tokens output (reasoning)
OpenAI has released o3 and o4-mini, their most powerful reasoning models. These models outperform their predecessors while delivering answers in under a minute. OpenAI also launched Codex CLI, an open-source terminal tool, with a $1 million fund to support related projects.
o3 $10/mil tokens input, $40/mil tokens output
o4-mini $1.1/mil tokens input, $4.4/mil tokens output
GPT 4.1 is announced as 3x developer-centric model releases available specifically via API. An internal instruction following eval was used to improve the model’s ability to follow instructions. Context size is 1m tokens. Pricing appears competitive if the new models have similar performance to Gemini/Sonnet:
gpt-4.1 $2/mil tokens input, $8/mil tokens output
gpt-4.1-mini $0.4/mil tokens input, $1.60/mil tokens output
gpt-4.1-nano $0.1/mil tokens input, $0.4/mil tokens output
GPT 4.5 will be deprecated over API in a few months
The mui folks mentioned a year ago they’d focus on extending base-ui and extracting it to it’s own repo. This has now been done and I note the docs have moved to base-ui.com and see an improved emphasis on accessibility.
From the creators of Radix, Material UI, and Floating UI, Base UI is an unstyled React component library for building accessible user interfaces. Our focus is on accessibility, performance, and developer experience. Our goal is to provide a complete set of open-source UI components, with a delightful developer experience, in a sustainable way.
Tailwind integration looks to just work as opposed to the steps needed to enable it in mui.
A summary of the security concerns with Model Context Protocol.
Meta releases first Llama 4 models:
- Llama 4 Scout, 109B parameters, 10M context length
- Llama 4 Maverick, 400B parameters, 1M context length
The above are distilled from an unreleased, still in training, larger model:
- Llama 4 Behemoth, 2T parameters
The free lunch that was smashing GitHub Copilot’s premium models with unlimited requests is over and rate limits are coming in May. Any requests not hitting the base model (currently: OpenAI GPT-4o) are considered premium, so Sonnet, Gemini, o1 etc. The rate limits are as follows:
Copilot Free: 50/month
Copilot Pro: 300/month
Copilot Pro+ 1500/month
Copilot Business: 300/month
Copilot Enterprise: 1000/month
The premium models also have a rate multiplier where for example Claude Sonnet 3.5/3.7 have a rate mulitplier of 1, and o1 and GPT-4.5 have a rate multiplier of 10 and 50 respectively.
The news comes with an announcement of the GitHub Copilot Pro+ plan, a new individual tier priced at 39USD/month with 1500 requests/month to premium models.
Gemini 2.5 Pro pricing is out. For prompts less than 200k tokens:
Input: $1.25/mil tokens
Output: $10/mil tokens
For prompts over 200k tokens:
Input: $2.50/mil tokens
Output: $15/mil tokens
Importantly this bumps the rate limit to at least 150RPM & 1,000RPD on Tier 1.
The success of the new ChatGPT 4o image generation caused the rollout to be delayed but it’s now available to free users, rate limited to 3 generations per day.
