u/TurbulentCow1371

I was recently read how the cheaper models some times don't seem to provide as much discount as they claim due to more number of turns they require to complete the same task.

I own a Claude Max Subscription, since they already provided discounted rates to their subscribers, Do I still get a considerable benefit from using APIs from the open source/cheap models?

I usually exhaust my 5hr and weekly window.

Will buying API keys of these opensource/cheaper models be more efficient or another 20$ plan from either GPT or claude would be more cost efficient and value for money?

Thanks for helping!!

I have been using Claude Bypass mode for generally all of my coding tasks. I know it is not recommended.

Do you also use bypass mode for your tasks. If yes then for what tasks?

And should I really switch from using bypass mode

Hi,

I am new to this sub and upwork

I am a software developer professionally.

I can build mobile/web apps.

I can also design agentic workflows, AI integrations and automations.

However I am facing difficulty in finding the first job on upwork, even being interviewed here.

How did you get your first job, what did you do?

and is it still relevant.

Take the call, take that decision.

Call out that girl and get free.

And if you find it impossible

then be free either ways, from the desire

dont chain yourself, chains arent pleasurable

and why would you chose suffering for yourself

be free! be free!

I just got back from a 10 day Vipassana course. For anyone who has not heard of it, Vipassana is a silent meditation retreat in the tradition taught by S.N. Goenka. You go to a centre for ten days. You hand over your phone, your wallet, your books, your pen. You take a vow of silence. No talking, no eye contact, no gestures, no reading, no writing. You wake at 4 AM. You sleep at 9:30 PM. In between, you meditate.

The meditation itself runs about 10 to 11 hours every day, split into three main phases. Morning, afternoon, and evening. Each phase is several hours of sitting, broken into sessions with 5 to 10 minute gaps in between. Just enough time to walk slowly to the bathroom and drink some water. Then the bell rings and you sit again. The afternoon phase was the worst for me. By the third session in a row, my body was done and my mind was done and there was still an hour to go.

The first few days were hard but manageable. Then on day 4 they introduced something called Adhitthana.

Adhitthana means strong determination. Three times a day, instead of a regular session, you sit for a full hour and take a pledge. For that hour you will not move your hands. You will not uncross your legs. You will not open your eyes. Whatever happens in your body, you stay.

The first few Adhitthana sittings were the most painful thing I have done with my body. Not gym painful. A different kind. Your hip flexors lock up. Your knees feel like they are on fire. Your back starts screaming around the 30 minute mark, and there is still half an hour to go. Your mind is begging you to just shift a little. Just one knee. Nobody will know.

Around day 5 or 6 I noticed something strange.

In the regular sessions, the ones without the pledge, I would give up all the time. Third session of the afternoon, mind exhausted, I would just slump or doze through it. But in the Adhitthana sessions, I sat through pain that was objectively worse, for longer, without moving an inch. Same body. Same tiredness. Different outcome.

The only difference was the pledge.

That is when I realised I had been confusing failure with quitting my whole life.

Failure is when your body or mind has actually reached its limit. The pain has crossed into something genuinely unsafe to push through. Your concentration is so fried that another rep, another minute, another hour will produce nothing useful. This is real. This deserves rest.

Quitting is when your mind constructs a story about why you should stop, and you believe it. I am tired. This is too hard. I will do it tomorrow. Let me just rest a little. None of these are failure. They are your mind looking for a soft exit, and most of the time we give it one.

I had been treating quitting as failure for years. In the gym, I would end sets two reps before actual failure because my mind said that is enough. At work, I would stop before I had really tried because it felt like too much. I called it knowing my limits. It was not. I had no idea where my limits were because I had never been to them.

So I have a rule I am trying to live by now.

I will rest when it is failure. Real, body or mind has nothing left, this rep will hurt me kind of failure. No guilt about it.

I will not quit when it is a mental construct. When the only reason to stop is that my mind has built a case for stopping, the case gets ignored. I keep going.

What helped me on the cushion was a small internal sentence I started saying before each hard session. Something like, I am with you. I am not here to hurt you. We will stop if it is real failure. We will not stop if it is a story. It sounds silly written down. It worked. I went from barely sitting through one hour to sitting through two hours straight without opening my legs or my eyes, in ten days.

The thing I keep thinking about now that I am home is that this idea translates to almost everything. The gym is the obvious one. But also working on hard problems. Also hard conversations. Also waking up early. Also not picking up the phone when you said you would not.

Most of the time when I think I have hit my limit, I have not. I have hit the moment where my mind starts negotiating. The limit is somewhere past that. I just have to be honest about which one I am at.

The course was the hardest thing I have done. It was also worth it.

Quick context, then a real question.

Launched a free single-purpose web tools collection (tinkrtool.com) about 9 days ago. 19 tools, no signup, no paid tier. Google's indexed 9 of them. The other 11 are stuck in "discovered, currently not indexed" purgatory.

What I've already done so we can skip the obvious:

- Sitemap submitted and confirmed read

- Every page has a unique title, meta description, canonical, OG image

- JSON-LD on every tool page: SoftwareApplication + FAQPage + BreadcrumbList, plus site-wide WebSite + Organization

- Mobile responsive, LCP around 2 seconds

- Internal linking via a RelatedTools component at the bottom of every tool

- Manually requested indexing for some of the 11 URLs today

- The 9 indexed pages are all the developer utilities I shipped first (regex, JWT, JSON, hash, etc.). The 11 stuck are the newer tools (alt-text, PDF utilities, voice, palette, YouTube description optimizer).

What I'm wondering:

1. Is "discovered, currently not indexed" on a fresh domain just a "wait 4 to 8 weeks" thing, or does manually requesting indexing actually move anything?
2. Backlinks vs on-page content depth at this stage — which mattered more for you?
3. Did anyone get out of this hole by accident (a viral moment, a single high-DA link, a Hacker News landing) rather than through SEO work?

If you've climbed out of this exact same hole, I'd love to hear what actually worked vs. what felt productive but didn't move anything.