#tech-builders

Ten July 2026 reports on Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, ZCode and more — cost hacks ($42.21 to $4.51), 90% scanner evasion, and Cursor's $60B SpaceX rumor.

OpenAI API vs DeepSeek V4 Flash: real bills show a 40-42x cut ($18,000 to $450/mo). July 2026 math on when the switch is worth the migration time.

Across 7 July 2026 reports, Claude Fable 5 leads SWE-Bench Pro at 80.3% versus Grok 4.5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Sonnet 5. Where each actually wins.

Sonnet 5 beats Sonnet 4.6 by 13-15% through Aug 31, 2026 — then costs 30% more after the price reverts and its tokenizer keeps burning extra tokens.

Eight published June 2026 benchmarks compared: Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Fable 5, GLM-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro. The 22-point SWE-bench spread that nobody tables.

GLM-5.2 costs an estimated $0.50/1M input tokens vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3/1M — a 6x gap. At Heavy workload, switching recovers the 10-hour migration cost in 2.3 months.

Across 8 June 2026 studies of LLM-as-Judge tools and methods, identical-prompt runs disagree like coin flips and brand bias skews 3 commercial judges.

Copilot switched to token-based AI Credits on June 1, 2026. Here's when the math breaks: Copilot Pro hits overage at 660+ credits/month; Medium workload costs $61/mo — $27 more than Pro Plus.

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 on June 9, 2026 at $10/$50 per 1M tokens with a 1M context window. Eight launch reports compared in one place.

Aggregating 10 reports from May-June 2026 on Ollama v0.24.0, vLLM v0.21.0, self-hosted costs from $5 to $32/month, and the ~6x throughput gap.

Claude Opus 4.8 runs $3,300/mo vs DeepSeek's $54 at Heavy workload. Here's the break-even math — and when Opus earns its 61x token premium.

Across 10 May 2026 benchmarks, frontier AI agents averaged below 60 percent on production tasks. Codex CLI hit 82.7 percent. ITBench fell under 50.