A Free-to-Play Old Fart

Old-timers like me use various services without paying a dime. I’d love to pay, but since I’m unemployed, I have no income—you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. Even so, I think Claude Code is a great site. As I set up this blog, the service I use the most is “GitLab.”If “GitLab” were just a place to host Git repositories, I could get by with 10GB—since my output is pretty limited, that wouldn’t be a problem. But I never expected to hit the paid quota for CI/CD’s Runner. Well, come to think of it, it makes perfect sense: as long as I’m using computing resources to run Runner, I’m bound to hit that limit…

　In light of this, when I asked AI for a solution, they advised me to leave file management to gitlab and run the process on my local PC. Indeed, the PC I’m currently using as my main drive is Ryzen, and since it has 32GB/2TB of storage, there’s no problem. Although I struggled a bit—and was anxious that the tokens at AI would run out quickly since I wasn’t paying for them—I managed to get it done.

　I’m trying to convince myself that the free-to-play option isn’t so bad after all. If I had so many tokens that I couldn’t possibly use them all up, I’d probably be glued to PClike a monkey, getting lost in it every day until I was completely exhausted—and I’d really hate that… Since they’re a limited resource, I’ll use them wisely, and I think my orders on AI will be precise and efficient. Or so I tell myself, just to save face…

　Even so, I’ve recently gotten to the point where I can get my work done without hitting the limit. Maybe I’m finally getting the hang of granularity-driven development.