Sunday, September 13, 2026

Several pricing adjustments were noted this week across various coding agents. Cursor's pricing floor changed from $20 to $0/mo, and Kiro also adjusted its typical pricing from $40 to $20/mo with its floor moving to $0/mo. In contrast, OpenAI Codex's typical pricing was detected to have changed from $20 to $100/mo.

In agent activity, Perplexity is reported to be using GPT-6 Astra for end-to-end systems, including writing communications, changing software, and monitoring production systems, with less frequent checking. Separately, GPT-6 Astra is also noted as requiring less oversight. Meanwhile, a user reported that Claude Code appends a new "Claude-Session" signature to commits even when the older co-authored signature setting is off. In model preferences, one user mentioned primarily using Opus 4.8 for web and mobile development, citing it as "good enough" and a good value.

New tools and development methods were also shared. A new tool called rust-split was introduced, designed to save tokens on large Rust source files by splitting them, addressing issues of large "God" files and token burn. Additionally, hill climbing was discussed as a practical method for improving AI agent performance through targeted evaluations.