Developer ships first WordPress.org plugin using AI tools, Git, and strict CI guardrails

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A freelance WordPress developer and father of twins has published his first WordPress.org plugin, TOCguide, a Gutenberg block that generates a table of contents with an optional reading guide. The plugin, live at version 1.6.3, requires no external accounts, tracking, or third-party APIs. The developer used AI tools — primarily Cursor with cloud agents and Grok Bot — alongside GitHub Actions CI to compress what would have been weeks of work into spare evening and weekend hours. He emphasised that AI was kept in check through written repo rules, automated linting and PHPCS checks, and manual review of every pull request before merging. The project is open source, licensed under GPLv2, and documented at a public GitHub Pages site.

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OSLabs Releases Open-Source CLI PennyWyze to Audit Claude API Costs

Three engineers at OSLabs have released PennyWyze, a free open-source command-line tool that helps developers find the cheapest Claude model tier that still meets their accuracy requirements. Users provide their production prompt and a labeled dataset of real examples, and the tool runs these against Claude's Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku tiers using the live Anthropic API. PennyWyze grades each model's responses against expected answers and calculates actual monthly cost projections based on real token counts. In one example audit, the tool identified that switching from Opus to Haiku could save roughly $180 per month with no loss in accuracy. Currently, PennyWyze supports exact-match grading, making it best suited for classification, extraction, and routing tasks rather than open-ended generation.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Free API tracks OpenAI Codex global usage-limit resets with 24/48h forecasts

A developer has launched codex-reset.com, a free tool that monitors and records OpenAI's informal global Codex usage-limit resets, which occur occasionally after incidents or milestones. The service provides a public JSON API requiring no key, offering probability forecasts for a reset occurring within the next 24 or 48 hours alongside a dated timeline of past resets with source links. It also tracks live Codex service status across multiple surfaces, helping users distinguish outages from quota exhaustion. The data is additionally available as a read-only MCP server that can be connected directly to Codex or Claude Code without installation or authentication. The project is free to use, with the only condition being visible attribution when the data is displayed to others.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

MCP vs CLI: The Right Choice Depends on Who Controls the Next Step

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

How to Add AI Agent Billing Without Disrupting Its Workflow Loop

When a subscription gateway is placed between an AI agent and its model provider, it can mistakenly interrupt multi-step tasks by treating each model request as a separate billable turn. The core problem is that billing layers can inadvertently take over orchestration decisions that should remain with the agent's local host. A properly designed billing gateway should only handle authentication, allowance checks, request forwarding, and usage accounting — not control the flow of the agent's tool loop or conversation context. Developers are advised to assign distinct identifiers to user turns, model operations, and business invocations to enable accurate metering and error recovery without disrupting execution. Keeping orchestration deliberately separated from billing ensures that paying for model access does not silently grant a second system control over the user's task.

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