Wednesday, July 8, 2026

The Cockpit Only Flies on Claude

The Cockpit Only Flies on Claude

Last post I told you how I got my agent roster off Anthropic's per-token meter. So here's the obvious follow-up before anyone asks it: no, I didn't quit Claude. I moved the volume off it — and I still reach for Claude on the jobs that earn it, because the one piece of tooling I refuse to work without doesn't run on anything else.

Before you ask

My last post was about moving a whole team of AI agents onto cheaper models — Kimi Code for the daily roster, GLM-5.2 through Ollama Cloud for the critic. The math was the point: don't pay frontier per-token rates for work a cheaper model does just fine.

The fair question after a post like that is "so you dumped Claude?" No. I didn't cut it and I didn't go free-only. I dropped from the $100 Max plan to the $17 Pro plan — and I want to be precise about why, because it's not the story you'd assume.

The plain truth, stated flat

Let me say the thing the whole "save money on AI" genre tiptoes around: people use Claude because it has the best models. That's it. That's the reason half the tech world develops on Claude Code. If you've got the budget, you buy the best tool on the shelf and you don't overthink it — and for a lot of serious work, the best tool is still Claude.

I'm not the exception to that. I still reach for Claude's top models when the work earns them — the gnarly architecture call, the review that has to be right, the thing where a second-tier answer costs me more than the tokens ever would. Nothing in my last post was "Claude isn't worth it." The post was "I was paying frontier rates for a lot of work that didn't need frontier answers." Those are completely different claims, and I collapsed them on purpose here because the internet loves to hear the second one as the first.

The money, right-sized

Here's the actual mechanic. Anthropic's plans, roughly: Pro at $17/month, Max from $100/month. For a year I sat on Max, and I sat there for one honest reason — I kept hitting limits. When you run a lot of Claude Code, Pro's ceiling arrives fast, and the only lever is the jump to Max.

Then I moved the volume. Once the daily grind — the eight-seat roster, the wide work — ran on Kimi and Ollama Cloud instead of on Claude, my Claude usage collapsed to only the sessions that actually wanted Claude's models. And that usage fits inside Pro with room to spare. I didn't downgrade because Anthropic charges too much. I downgraded because I stopped asking Claude to do the work that was inflating my own bill. Right-sizing, not a protest.

So the honest headline isn't "I quit paying Anthropic." It's "I finally pay Anthropic for the right amount of the right thing."

The part I'd never give up: the cockpit

Here's what surprised me. When I trimmed Claude down to just the top-model sessions, I braced to lose the thing I'd quietly come to depend on. I didn't — because it comes with Pro, not just Max.

Claude Code has a pair of features — Remote Control and background sessions — and together they're the best-built version of "run my work from anywhere" I've used. The whole ritual is three commands inside a session:

/rename deborah-schema-review   # a name I'll recognize, not a hash
/remote-control                 # let my phone reach this one
/bg                             # cut it loose from this terminal

Each does one thing. /rename labels the session. /remote-control registers it so the Claude app on my phone can drive it — the session shows a QR code to scan, and after that it's live and in sync across terminal and phone. And /bg hands it to a background supervisor that keeps it running with no terminal attached at all.

Then comes the part I actually love. From any terminal — a fresh tab, another box, an SSH shell into Deborah from wherever I've wandered off to — one command shows me the whole fleet:

claude agents

One screen, every background session, grouped by what it's doing: Working, Needs input, Completed. Each row is a full Claude Code conversation still alive under the supervisor — peek at it, fire back a reply, attach for the whole transcript, then leave it running again. What sold me on the lot of it is the shape underneath:

  • It runs on my machine. Remote Control isn't cloud Claude — the session executes locally, against my filesystem, my MCP servers, my project config. Only the chat messages travel, over TLS, outbound HTTPS only. No inbound ports opened on my box. Files never leave.
  • It survives the terminal. A backgrounded session lives under a per-user supervisor process, not the shell that started it. Close the tab, let the laptop sleep — the work keeps going and picks back up on wake. Each session even isolates its file edits in its own git worktree, so parallel ones don't step on each other.
  • Two ways back in. claude agents from any shell that can reach the box, or the phone's Code tab for the remote-controlled ones — a labeled list with a green dot on whatever's live.

The engineering here is genuinely good, and it's Anthropic's. Short-lived credentials scoped to a single purpose, each expiring on its own. No open ports. The web and mobile surfaces are just a window onto a process that never left my desk. Somebody thought hard about the security model, and it shows.

And here's the part that reframed the whole "I moved off Claude" story for me: the cockpit only flies on Claude's own models. Remote Control needs Claude Code talking straight to api.anthropic.com under a claude.ai login. The moment you point Claude Code at another provider — exactly what I do when I run GLM-5.2 through Ollama Cloud, which redirects the API endpoint — Remote Control switches off. API keys don't unlock it either; it wants the subscription. So this isn't a feature I get to keep instead of paying for Claude's brains. I get it because I'm on them. The cockpit and the top models are welded together: when I want the one, I'm running the other.

That's not a complaint — it's the reason the whole arrangement holds. The jobs where I reach for the cockpit are the jobs I wanted Claude's best models for in the first place. The tooling being locked to the models just means the seat I keep for Claude is a seat that pulls double duty: best answers and the best way to drive them from anywhere.

Kick it off, then go live your life

This is the workflow I can't imagine giving back. I start a Claude session at my desk on something that's going to take a while — a long review, a big refactor, a data job — and then I leave. On the couch, in the truck, in line somewhere, I open the Claude app, tap Code, and there's my session in the list with a little green dot next to it. I steer it from my thumb.

And I don't have to babysit it. Claude Code will push a notification to my phone when a long job finishes or when it hits a fork it needs me to settle. I can even ask for it in the prompt — notify me when the migration finishes — and get pinged when it lands. A backgrounded session plus a phone in my pocket means "start it and walk away" is a real workflow, not a demo.

One honest limit, because it matters: this whole thing lives on my machine. The supervisor that keeps those background sessions alive runs on Deborah — so if the box is powered down or off the network, the fleet's asleep too. That's the trade for keeping everything local instead of handing it to somebody's cloud, and frankly it's the trade I'd pick every time.

And here's the admission that follows straight from it: when I know I'm going to want to leave the desk and keep working, I have to start that session on Claude. Not because the cheap models can't do the work — they can — but because they can't come with me. Kimi and the Ollama-Cloud models are brilliant while I'm sitting in front of the terminal; the moment I stand up, they stay behind. So the decision of which brain to reach for isn't purely "how hard is this problem" anymore. Half the time it's "am I going to want to walk away from this one" — and when the answer is yes, the choice makes itself. That job goes to Claude, because Claude is the only one that follows me to the couch.

Why this still isn't renting a mind

If you read my last post you know the line I keep coming back to: a mind you rent is a mind someone else can switch off. So it's fair to ask how driving Claude from my phone squares with that.

It squares cleanly, and this is the part I actually love. Remote Control is the inverse of rented compute. The model call still goes to Anthropic — I'm paying for the brain, same as always — but the session, the files, the tools, the whole working context, all of it stays on Deborah. I'm not shipping my work to someone's cloud to reach it from the road. I'm reaching back into hardware I own, through an encrypted pinhole, from anywhere. Remote access to my own stack is the most on-brand thing I could ask a tool to do. Cloud for the brain, local for everything around it — the same bridge I've argued for all along, just with a phone on the far end of it.

The one thing I wish

I'll be straight about where this leaves the cheaper tools I love. Kimi Code is my daily driver and I'm not walking that back — it does the bulk of the real work and it does it well. But it doesn't have this. No Remote Control, no phone-in-the-loop, no push-when-it-lands. If it shipped that, I'd lean on it for even more than I already do.

That's not a knock on Kimi — it's a measure of how far ahead Anthropic shipped on this particular thing. Remote Control landed as a research preview and it already feels more finished than most products' 2.0. I hope the whole ecosystem chases it, because everybody driving sessions from their pocket would be a better world to work in. But today, if you want it, there's one place to get the good version of it, and Anthropic built it.

Where this actually nets out

So here's the shape of my stack now, without the spin:

  • Cheap models carry the volume — the roster, the wide work, the third and fourth opinions. Kimi and Ollama Cloud, for pennies on the frontier dollar.
  • Claude carries the work that earns it — the sharpest calls, on the best models around, which are still Anthropic's. I pay for that gladly.
  • And I drive the whole Claude side of it from my phone, on the $17 plan, because I stopped feeding it the volume that used to force me up to $100.

That's the same thesis as last time, just told from the other end: cheap where I can, the best tool where it counts. The version of "saving money on AI" that ages well isn't refusing to pay for quality — it's refusing to pay quality prices for quantity work. Move the quantity, keep the quality, and the bill and the toolset both come out better than where you started.

The best models still win. I'm just careful now about which jobs I hand them — and grateful that the tool wrapped around them lets me run those jobs from a phone on my couch, against a machine that's still sitting on my own desk.

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Keith is a database consultant and infrastructure engineer with 25+ years of open-source experience. He writes about MySQL, Proxmox, AI memory, and building technology you can actually inspect.

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Tuesday, July 7, 2026

I Kept Paying for One AI Model. Then Ollama Handed Me 37 for Twenty Bucks.

I Kept Paying for One AI Model. Then Ollama Handed Me 37 for Twenty Bucks.

I Kept Paying for One AI Model. Then Ollama Handed Me 37 of Them for Twenty Bucks.

Half the tech world develops on Claude Code now — which means paying Anthropic prices for Fable and Opus. I run a whole team of AI agents, and I've spent the last year quietly moving them off that meter. Here's the dual-CLI setup I actually run, and the one ollama launch command that moved my last holdout.

The itch

If you've read my earlier posts, you know where I sit. Twenty-five years in open source. A homelab I built out of jealousy. A persistent-memory system I built out of frustration. And a stubborn belief that a mind you rent is a mind someone else can switch off.

That one stopped being theoretical last month. On June 12, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — Anthropic's newest, most capable models — went dark for every customer on the planet. Not an outage, not a billing dispute. A US government export-control directive that took effect the same afternoon, which Anthropic complied with by 5:21pm ET because a jailbreak had been found and there was no way to verify who was on the other end of the API. Paying customers included. The models came back on July 1, nineteen days later, once the order lifted. Anthropic didn't want to pull them and said so plainly — and it didn't matter. If a critical seat in your workflow was running on Fable 5 that week, it was simply gone, and nothing you'd paid was bringing it back a minute sooner. That's the whole thesis in one news cycle: a mind you rent is a mind someone else can switch off.

Here's the reality nobody wants to put a number on: half the tech world develops on Claude Code now. It's a genuinely great tool — I use it too. But "everybody's on Claude Code" quietly means "everybody's paying Anthropic's meter," and that meter is not cheap. Opus was never cheap. Fable 5 is worse — it burns tokens like it's got something to prove, and the bill shows it. If you run one assistant a few hours a day, fine. I don't run one assistant.

I run a team. And when you're paying frontier per-token rates across a whole roster of agents, the math stops being cute real fast.

The dual approach I actually run

When I develop, I don't sit in one CLI talking to one model. I run a team of AI agents with distinct seats, and I split them across two CLIs based on what each seat costs to feed:

  • Kimi Code CLI carries the roster — DEV 1 through DEV 5, plus a PMO, a DBA, and a REVIEWER. Kimi's CLI is way cheaper than Anthropic and, honestly, GREAT. That's not a consolation-prize "cheaper so I tolerate it" — it does the bulk of the real work every day and it's my daily driver for a reason. Eight seats' worth of token burn on the cheap tier instead of the frontier meter is the difference between a hobby and a bill I'd have to explain.
  • Anthropic was reserved for the one seat where I wanted the sharpest possible teeth: the CRITIC. The critic's whole job is to refuse to rubber-stamp anything without proof — so I paid up for it and let the eight cheaper agents do the volume.

The wiring is dead simple, and that's the point. There's one shared folder with a top-level CLAUDE.md — the common rules every agent obeys: the standards, the DB conventions, the "don't guess, inspect" discipline. Then each team member gets its own subfolder with a personalized CLAUDE.md that defines that seat — DEV 3 is a developer, the DBA thinks in schemas and EXPLAIN plans, the CRITIC is paid to be adversarial. Shared law at the top, individual personality per folder.

They don't coordinate through me. They coordinate through a MySQL database — the same persistent-memory backbone the rest of my stack runs on. Each agent posts what it's doing and reads the others' project status straight from the DB, so the REVIEWER knows what DEV 2 shipped and the PMO can see the whole board without anyone copy-pasting between terminals. I'm a database guy; of course the team runs on a database.

That split held for a long time. Cheap models for the wide work, frontier Anthropic for the one adversary that has to be right. Then, recently, even that changed.

I moved the CRITIC off pure Anthropic — it now runs GLM-5.2, via Claude Code, through Ollama Cloud. Same Claude Code tooling my critic already lived in. Different, cheaper brain behind it. That one move is what this post is really about, and it comes down to a single command.

The one command

Turns out Ollama solved this quietly a while back and I slept on it. Not local models this time — Ollama Cloud. Big models, hosted, but driven through the same ollama CLI I already have wired into everything.

Here's the whole trick:

ollama launch claude --model glm-5.2:cloud

That launches Claude Code — the actual tool, hooks, agents, MCP, all of it — pointed at GLM-5.2 running in Ollama's cloud instead of Anthropic's API. Here's the real banner, unedited, off my own box:

 ▐▛███▜▌   Claude Code v2.1.202
▝▜█████▛▘  glm-5.2:cloud · API Usage Billing

Note the second line: it's the genuine Claude Code TUI, but the model tag reads glm-5.2:cloud, and billing is running through Ollama, not Anthropic. Same keybindings, same workflow, different brain. Want a different one? Change the flag:

ollama launch claude --model kimi-k2.7-code:cloud
ollama launch claude --model deepseek-v4-pro:cloud
ollama launch claude --model qwen3-coder-next:cloud

ollama launch isn't Claude-only, either. It'll wire the same cloud models into a whole shelf of coding tools:

claude    codex    kimi    droid    opencode    cline    qwen    copilot    ...

So Kimi has its own excellent CLI — I use it — but if I want Kimi's k2.7 model inside Claude Code's workflow, or Claude's tooling with DeepSeek's weights, ollama launch just does it. The tool and the model stopped being the same decision. That's the part that got me.

How many models are we talking about

I asked my box. Point ollama at your cloud registry and count:

$ ollama list | grep cloud | wc -l
37

Thirty-seven. Not toy models — the frontier-adjacent open stuff. A slice of what's on mine right now:

glm-5.2:cloud
glm-5:cloud
kimi-k2.7-code:cloud
kimi-k2-thinking:cloud
deepseek-v4-pro:cloud
deepseek-v4-flash:cloud
deepseek-v3.2:cloud
qwen3.5:397b-cloud
qwen3-coder-next:cloud
qwen3-vl:235b-cloud
minimax-m3:cloud
mistral-large-3:675b-cloud
nemotron-3-ultra:cloud
gpt-oss:120b-cloud
gemini-3-flash-preview:cloud
gemma4:31b-cloud
cogito-2.1:671b-cloud

Browse the live shelf yourself: ollama.com/search?c=cloud. It grows. glm-5.2 and kimi-k2.7-code on mine are two weeks old.

The thing that makes this useful isn't any single model — it's the swap. When someone posts a benchmark like GLM-5.2 vs Claude Opus 4.8 or Kimi vs Claude, I don't have to take their word for it. I run the same task through both in the same terminal and read my own diff. Benchmarks are somebody else's workload. This is mine.

The money

Here's the honest breakdown, because that's the whole reason this post exists.

  • Free tier: you can point ollama launch at cloud models and run real work against them at no cost, with hourly and daily rate limits. Fine for kicking the tires and light use. You will hit the ceiling on a serious session.
  • $20/month (Ollama Cloud Pro): the limits open up enough that it stops getting in your way. Twenty dollars — the same price as a single frontier subscription — for the whole shelf of thirty-seven instead of one.

Do the math the way a consultant does. One vendor's mid subscription buys you one vendor's models. The same $20 here buys you GLM and Kimi and DeepSeek and Qwen and the rest, all reachable from the tool you already know, swappable with a flag. I still keep my Anthropic subscription for the top-end Claude work. But for "let me get three opinions on this migration before I commit," this is the cheapest second, third, and fourth opinion I've ever bought.

Kimi's ladder does the same thing

The Ollama trick is the headline, but the other half of my bill tells the same story from a different angle. Kimi Code isn't just cheaper per token — its subscriptions are priced like a ladder you actually climb, not a cliff you fall off. Look at the rungs:

  • Moderato — $19/mo: entry tier, Kimi Code included, agent multi-tasking, scheduled tasks.
  • Allegretto — $39/mo: 2× agent credits, Kimi Code at 5× credits, Agent Swarm, the works.
  • Allegro — $99/mo: 5× agent credits, Kimi Code at 15×.
  • Vivace — $199/mo: 10× agent credits, Kimi Code at 30×.

I run eight agents on this and I sit on Allegretto at $39. That's the whole point: at thirty-nine dollars I don't hit limits. Not "rarely" — I run a team of agents on real projects all day and the ceiling simply isn't in my way. And if I ever outgrew it, there's a $99 rung and a $199 rung waiting, each a clean step up.

Now line that against Anthropic. Claude Pro is $17/mo. The next thing up is Max, from $100/mo. There is nothing in between. No middle rung for the person who's outgrown Pro but doesn't need — or want to pay for — a hundred-dollar-plus plan. So you sit on Pro, hit the wall, and your only move is a 6× jump to Max — where, if you're actually working, you still hit limits. You pay more and more and the wall's still there.

That's the difference in one line: Kimi sells you a staircase; Anthropic sells you a $17 room and a $100 room with a locked door between them. For a guy running eight seats, the staircase wins every time.

Why the CRITIC could move

Moving my critic off Anthropic wasn't a leap of faith. It was a benchmark I ran myself.

The critic's job is adversarial: pick apart a schema change, find the edge case in a query rewrite, refuse to sign off on "will this lock the table" without proof. For a year I assumed that seat needed frontier Anthropic. Then the GLM-5.2 vs Claude Opus 4.8 numbers started looking close, and instead of trusting the benchmark I ran my own — same critic prompt, same production DB tasks, Opus in one terminal and glm-5.2:cloud in the next, both inside the exact same Claude Code tooling. On the work I actually do, GLM-5.2 held the line well enough that paying the Anthropic premium for that seat stopped making sense.

So now the roster looks like this: eight agents on Kimi Code CLI for the volume, and a CRITIC on GLM-5.2 through Claude Code + Ollama Cloud for the teeth. Anthropic's still there when I want the top-end Claude for something specific — but it's a deliberate reach now, not the default tax on every session. Different models are wrong in different ways; the trick is paying frontier prices only for the seat where the difference actually shows up, and I stopped assuming that was a permanent list.

Say the quiet part out loud

I'm not going to pretend this is the thing I actually believe in. My philosophy hasn't moved: don't rent, own. don't guess, inspect. don't forget, remember. And Ollama Cloud is rented. Those weights run on someone else's GPU, behind someone else's rate limit, subject to someone else's pricing change next quarter. It is not a mind I own. If the internet's down, so is this whole post.

So here's how I actually reconcile it, same as the homelab: I hybrid. Local models on Deborah for anything private, anything sensitive, anything I need to inspect down to the weights. Ollama Cloud for capability I don't have the GPU for — a 675B Mistral or a 397B Qwen is never loading on a 16GB 4070. The honest framing is that this is the same bridge I've always run, just cheaper and better-plumbed: local for control and privacy, cloud for capability.

The difference this command makes is that the cloud half is no longer locked to one vendor's model or one vendor's price. That's not ownership. But it's leverage, and leverage is worth twenty dollars.

And here's the part that makes it more than a compromise: these are open weights. GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen — I'm renting them in Ollama's cloud today for exactly one reason, and it's not licensing. It's that a 675B Mistral or a 397B Qwen doesn't fit on a 16GB 4070. That's a hardware problem, and hardware problems have an expiration date.

When I get a bigger GPU, all of the cloud comes home. The same glm-5.2 running my CRITIC from someone else's datacenter today is a model I can ollama pull onto Deborah tomorrow and run against weights I inspect, on hardware nobody can switch off. The cloud tier isn't the destination — it's the bridge I run until the GPU catches up. Don't rent, own. I'm just renting the runway.

The whole thing in four lines

# 1. sign in once
ollama signin

# 2. see what's on the shelf
ollama list | grep cloud

# 3. drive Claude Code with any of them
ollama launch claude --model glm-5.2:cloud

# 4. don't like this brain? swap the flag.
ollama launch claude --model kimi-k2.7-code:cloud

That's it. Tool you already know, thirty-seven models behind it, one subscription. Rent the capability, keep owning the stack around it.

And this isn't frugality for its own sake. I'm building a lot — a team of agents running real projects around the clock, and a longer bet I've written about before: an actual mind on hardware I own, not a chatbot with a nice voice. You don't fund that on frontier per-token rates paid across nine seats every hour of every day. Cheap where I can is exactly what buys me expensive where it counts. The dollars I don't hand Anthropic for volume work are the dollars that go into the GPU that eventually brings all of this home.

I'm not there yet. But while I get there, I'd be lying if I said this didn't make the in-between a lot more useful.

Related reading

Keith is a database consultant and infrastructure engineer with 25+ years of open-source experience. He writes about MySQL, Proxmox, AI memory, and building technology you can actually inspect.

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