Code is cheap now

I’ve been using Pi and OhMyPi consistenly with mostly GLM 5.3 flash but also Deepseek v4.1 for the last month i think. Why you ask? Because i am from Zeeland and i dont want to pay more than i need to; GLM and Deepseek are positioned very nicely on the bend of the intelligence/price chart, further up/right you see marginal improvements in intelligence for significant cost increases.

I’ve come to realize, also from listening to influential developers’ blogs and talks, that code is cheap now. So cheap in fact that re-using other peoples libraries or plugins or tools might be more expensive compared to making it yourself. Pi plugins for example, I started my pi journey with installing a bunch, then moved to OhMyPi, next i found myself something wanting to use just a clean empty Pi for some projects. So now i use the fully loaded OhMyPi with memory and everything and sometimes i use a Pi with only few plugins.

Now I make sure to build every plugin I use for Pi myself, first because its cheap, second because I can have it made to my exact measurements, i mean wishes.

I ran a pretty extensive Jev experiment, and after some testing, I built (like many) a guardrails plugin that uses a checklist to verify each command before its ran. Cheap to run, fast, and pretty good so far I found. Subagents plugins I noticed often contained pre-defined roles, which was more that i needed, so i build subagents that are simple and just take prompt and skills, which I think is more flexible.

Given how easy it is to do this, the risk of using libraries or plugins or tools made by some-person is not worth it.