The industry is slowly realizing that the honeymoon phase of AI is sunsetting and we are now being subjected to the reality of cost. Some organizations have learned that AI isn’t as affordable as it hoped to be, and that hiring actual human beings is still cheaper and more efficient.
That being said, I still believe that AI can work for you as a personal assistant. I’m still in the beginner stages of vibe coding but I’ve managed to shave roughly 40 minutes per every hour for menial editorial tasks with my web app. This is my GCP cost for April 2026 with just one seat (me lol).
So the lessons are still the same – make AI work for you, not replace you. I’ve built a very customized engine that only works for me, so I understand its nuances and limitations.
I initially was drawn to using Claude, but it was charging me when I started to use Claude Code and I got rate limited to death with the free version. I shifted to Google AI Studio and built a simple app that I was able to deploy on test and production servers via Google Cloud — AI Studio set this up rather well. It’s essentially an editorial helper that, well, helps ME and only me. I’ve trained it in pattern recognition with over 10,000 words of my writing. It’s not to be used to generate full articles but to extract routine features such as tech specs from press releases and review guides, conversion of titles into Yoast-friendly scoring, with added keywords.
I’m running my app 100% on Google AI Studio because it’s cheap! If you want to start vibe coding I’d highly recommend it because of their hyperscaler ecosystem vs Claude where you gotta pay to deploy basic apps on Code
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