I'm starting to believe that LLMs have great potential to keep us dumb and unproductive. It's great fun to throw Sonnet at some big code base and get the resemblance of new features in seconds but the more involved it gets the more it tends to introduce errors and then you are just debugging which is a great opportunity to add more errors and then the task can only be abandoned after spending time and money on it.

So if you have no idea about coding, it gives you a magic wand that can summon stuff you couldn't imagine before but for somebody who has summoned stuff for many years this magic wand is kind of under-powered still.

OpenRouter appears to be the main player in the field of providing access to multiple LLMs and while it appears to have some features I'm missing at @npub16g4...kv4h, its payment process is the best advertisement to not using them.

First of all, I have to create an account and agree to the privacy policy and TOS. Ok, nobody reads those, right?

Then my first query fails due to lack of funds. Sure, same with @npub16g4...kv4h.

Let's add some funds, shall we? I heard they also accept "crypto".

I have to opt in to use crypto and it defaults to $10 but the due amount is $10.53? A 5.3% fee for using the hardest money possible? That's quite a surprise, given @npub16g4...kv4h has a 5% discount instead.

So, whatever. I'm not going to stay long. I just want to try this out to know what I'm missing out on. After all, @npub16g4...kv4h costs a ton when using in the Cline plugin and while some claim it's just how Cline works, I wanted to see for myself if changing between the providers mid session would change the fees. But not with $10. How about $5? Well, no surprise, the fee just went up a bit but not much. 5.4% it is, so I'm getting my wallet ready ... but what is this???

I want to make a payment, not connect a wallet. Apparently Bitcoin is not supported at least by this merchant.

Clicking on "Open Billing Portal" on the other hand opens stripe and pre-fills my full name and email address. I can't edit neither. Guess I have to trust stripe to not have harvested my email before hitting that submit button. We will see in my spam folder.

Well, ... guess I'll leave it to the PPQ team to monitor their competition and trust them after having seen enough red flags elsewhere.