u/Background-Zebra5491

So i work remotely and manage like 3-4 projects at the same time. Claude code is great dont get me wrong, the quality is there and it genuinly helps me ship faster. Thats not the issue.

The issue is i'm literally watching money burn everytime i start a session. Longer projects eat through tokens insanly fast and when your bouncing between multiple codebases daily it adds up to a point where im questioning if this is even sustainible.

Ive been reading alot on here and other subs about chinese models like deepseek and glm being way cheaper with decent performance. Someone posted that glm-5.1 is suposedly at a level where it can compete with claude code on coding tasks. Havent tried it myself yet but at this point i'm seriously considering it just to stop the bleeding on my monthly costs.

Anyone else here working remote and managing multiple projects at once? How are you dealing with the token situation? Do you just eat the cost, switch models for certain tasks, or what? Genuinely need some ideas because right now the math isnt matching.

Not gonna lie, it feels harder than before. Ads are more expensive, products die fast, and competition is everywhere.What are you guys actually relying on now, Meta ads, influencers, email, or something else?

Trying to figure out what still works in 2026.

Trying to test influencer stuff here but finding the right people is taking forever ngl.

Is everyone just doing manual search?

I have been working in design for over ten years, and I have never seen the industry change as fast as it is right now. I find that I am spending significantly less time actually pushing pixels in Photoshop and much more time managing automated workflows and curating the output of various tools.

It is an interesting transition, but sometimes I worry that we are losing the "soul" of professional design in favor of pure efficiency. On the other hand, it allows us to test ideas at a speed that was impossible five years ago. Do you think this shift toward automation is helping our industry evolve, or are we just becoming "quality control" managers for machines?

okay so I came from a Sony setup and one thing I always saw people rave about was head gesture controls on apple products. Sony had something similar on their buds for a while but I tried it on my WF-1000XM5 and honestly it was inconsistent enough that I gave up on it pretty fast. head tracking would miss inputs or fire at weird times.

just got the buds4 pro as part of moving deeper into the samsung ecosystem and tried head gestures again not expecting much. it's genuinely different. nod to answer, shake to reject, and it has not misfired once in two weeks of daily use. I think the IMU sensor in these is just more accurate than what I had before.

curious if anyone else came from a different ecosystem and had a similar experience? or if you tried this on older galaxy buds and wrote it off before