You can already get Claude Code, Cursor or GitHub Copilot to produce working code. This section is about the thing on the other side of that: what it sees, what it charges you, what it can reach on your machine, and why the second hour of a session is usually worse than the first.

Seven sections. Read them in order the first time; each one assumes the one before it.

  1. What this can and cannot do yet
  2. What this costs
  3. Chat versus agent
  4. The context window
  5. Tokens and false economies
  6. Models and effort
  7. How it goes wrong