Stack Log — 9 Feb 2026

Brief snapshot of current tooling and what’s next.

Present Stack

Primary Models

  • Kimi K2.5: Dominant daily driver. Free via OpenCode Zen (generous tier) + API credits. Most cost-effective frontier access right now.
  • Opus 4.6: Still in rotation for deep reasoning and complex architectures. See pricing comparison.

Media / Research

  • Flow: Google’s generative video workspace (Veo3). Testing for content creation workflows.
  • Google AI Studio: Rapid prototyping and prompt engineering before committing API spend.
  • Researching the differentiation between Google Labs vs Google AI Studio vs Flow — complex branding overlap. Published the field guide.

Infrastructure Prep

  • VPS selection underway for OpenClaw walkthrough. Testing providers for:
    • UFW + Tailscale compatibility
    • Snapshot automation
    • $5-10/mo price band
  • Goal: Disposable, isolated compute for agent experiments. Not buying dedicated hardware.

The Rate Limit Reality

Status: Hitting walls everywhere except OpenCode.

Screenshot: Rate limit screens showing 100% weekly usage on Google AI Studio, 0% remaining, and “You’ve hit your limit” messages. Google AI Studio: 100% weekly usage, 55 hours until reset. Meanwhile, OpenCode Zen keeps running.

What happened:

  • Google AI Studio (Gemini 3 Flash): Hit the weekly quota in ~2 days of actual work. The “100% Resets in 55 hours” message is… not helpful when you have work to do today.
  • Antigravity: Still one of the best offers on paper (1M context, $20/mo), but the Claude Opus integration is effectively unusable due to rate limits. The 5-hour refresh only applies to Gemini models.
  • OpenCode Zen (Kimi K2.5): Limits still generous. This is where most of the actual work is happening.

Current workflow reality:

Sad Pablo Escobar waiting

Google Labs tools when you need them: waiting. OpenCode: actually working.

The irony: Antigravity technically has better specs (1M context vs 256K), but rate limits make it theoretical. Kimi via OpenCode has lower limits on paper but practical access for getting work done.

Verdict: Free tier generosity beats theoretical capability when you need to ship. OpenCode + Kimi K2.5 is the actual daily driver. Google tools are for experiments when the limits reset.

Upcoming

  • Flow differentiation research: Covering the Google AI suite maze — Labs, Studio, Flow. When to use what.
  • OpenClaw VPS guide: Step-by-step from fresh VM to production-hardened agent runtime.