u/jeremyckahn

Hello everyone! The Farmhand dev team has been quite busy lately. After spending the last year or so overhauling the internals of the game, we're excited to share our first major new gameplay feature in a very long time: The Forest!

In the latest update, players can access the Forest starting at level 15. In the Forest, you can plant saplings and watch them grow into trees over time. Trees bear fruit and can be chopped down into wood. Wood and fruit can be used for a variety of recipes. It's early days for the Forest feature, and we will be adding more tree varieties over time. You can learn more in the official Forest wiki page: https://github.com/jeremyckahn/farmhand/wiki/Forest-And-Trees

Props to Luke on the dev team for building this new feature. It's been in development for years and it feels great to finally ship it to players!

Taken from the window.

At Montrose and Western.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2026/01/27/mural-of-slain-ukrainian-refugee-effort-funded-by-elon-musk-appears-in-chicago-sav45

During the first part of 2026, a trend called "tokenmaxxing" caught on. Essentially, it became a sort of competition among software engineers for who could use the most LLM tokens, as it was assumed that token usage is an ostensible proxy for productivity. If you think on this for about 20 seconds, it's about as flawed as maximizing lines of code as a means of delivering value (spoiler alert: the opposite is true). Nevertheless, there is a certain level of tokens that is proportional to the value they result in. And whether you're using tokens efficiently or not, they cost a flat rate (even if your AI subscription hides this fact from you).

I don't know about you, but I hate monthly subscription bills. And I REALLY hate exorbitant service bills that are in the triple digits. $20 dollars a month is about as much as I feel comfortable spending, so I wanted to see how far I can take that and still be productive.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all offer $20, $100, and $200 plans. In terms of agentic coding, the main difference between each of them is the amount of tokens you get. The $20 tiers are generally seen as pretty meager, and that's generally true… with one exception if you're willing to get resourceful.

The Google juice

I don't fully trust any tech companies, but I trust Google slightly more than OpenAI or Anthropic (a minuscule amount of trust is greater than no amount of trust). Admittedly, that may just be resignation because they've had all my data since before OpenAI and Anthropic existed, and there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube so it is what it is. In any case, if I'm going to give any malevolent AI company my $20 a month, they seem like the least bad option from a privacy standpoint (yes, the bar really is that low). Objectively, you get far more value for your subscription dollars with Google because they have a wide-ranging ancillary product offering and aren't just a token factory. For example, along with Antigravity you get increased Google Drive capacity and a bunch of other meaningful fringe benefits. At the risk of sounding like a shill, I feel like I receive commensurate value for the $20 I send Google every month.

This is also why I think Google will "win" AI in the end, but I digress.

But there's one wildly underutilized Google product that makes this post's SEO-optimized title possible: Google Jules.

Google Jules is a coding agent. Yes, like all the other coding agents that you've used. They're all iterations on a theme at this point. But what makes Jules special is its pricing structure: It offers effectively unlimited token quota. To be upfront, this is only technically true but only practically meaningful up to a point, because Jules is also flawed in multiple nontrivial ways. If you haven't used Jules, it's like all the other coding agents: You give it a goal, maybe talk through it interactively to align on expectations, and then set it off until it's done. It's worth mentioning that Jules is exclusively cloud-based, which I think is one of its key strengths. I don't really care if the model (Gemini) goes off the rails and nukes the home directory because it's running within a VM in a data center somewhere, far away from my precious data.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Jules is quite slow for complex tasks. Like, REALLY slow. It's churned for weeks at a time on some of the tasks I've given it. But I'm only paying $20 a month and I never reach any quota limits, so this seems like a reasonable tradeoff. And on the $20 a month tier you get 100 different tasks per day, which is exceedingly generous in my experience. Even when I'm going all-out I've never come close to reaching a quarter of my daily task allotment.

It's worth mentioning that a "task" in Jules' parlance is not the same as a prompt. A task is essentially an unbounded thread that you can iterate on endlessly. I have never hit a token limit on any Jules task, and I have iterated quite a bit on some of them. I just never have to think about quota limits of any kind with Jules.

Upon completion of a given goal, Jules automatically makes a GitHub PR. Except for relatively simple goals, Jules' results often leave something to be desired. Personally, I refuse to fix AI's mistakes. AI should do that, because I am lazy and also AI should own what it gets wrong. The robots work for me, not the other way around. Sometimes a followup prompt to Jules is sufficient, but I've had mixed results with that. I often need to get more tactical than Jules' UX allows for, so I'll often pull down the branch that Jules made and iterate and polish with Antigravity.

Antigravity is great (mainly because it comes with my Google subscription and I don't have to pay extra for it), but its token quota is underwhelming. It's pretty easy to burn through your weekly quota, so I save it for when I need to get a Jules PR merge-ready. When used sparingly and intentionally, I've found Antigravity's quota to be sufficient and not limiting.

So my workflow is 90% Jules, 10% Antigravity. Between the two I have enough quota to do whatever I need and not really worry about token costs or limits. There are tradeoffs to this approach, namely that Jules is slow and I have to consciously minimize my use of Antigravity to avoid hitting its quota limits. But I'm able to be productive without hitting quota limits, and that feels like a victory to me. :)