Free compute worth claiming in July 2026
A July 2026 field guide to free VPS, serverless, databases, product plumbing, developer tools, AI APIs, and GPU compute.
Posts by billiem
GPT-5.6 needed a more ambitious prompt
The first GPT-5.6 LLM Choice batch was polished but shallow. A prompt built around ambition and depth produced much stronger artefacts.
The Model Isn't Everything.
A local LLM Choice experiment showed how harnesses, repair loops, tools, and model strength changed coding-agent results.
A thought can be a URL now
A Discord argument about biological wheels became a deployed Cloudflare Pages simulation in about ten minutes.
Voice made my idea system start working
A low-friction Linear idea ledger works for me because voice and agents made capture and retrieval cheap enough to happen.
LLM Choice is mostly an idea engine
Using autonomous coding-agent runs as a low-cost way to find ideas, learn unfamiliar topics, and seed later projects.
I added a graph because the site needed some shape
A small site graph made billiem.uk feel more like a growing personal object than a fast but flat static site.
My local LLM clone failed where the data failed
A local LoRA experiment on Discord data became a lesson in data shape, routing, evaluation, and knowing when to stop.
When personal automation stops being procrastination
A chair scraper turned a fragmented refurb search into a dashboard and alerts, saving more than £100 in a few days.
Free compute worth claiming in June 2026
A June 2026 field guide to free VPS, edge, database, email, observability, auth, storage, and AI compute for side projects.