Paul Sullivan

I’m continuing to put my RTX 5090 through its paces. A few months ago I tried running Qwen3-Coder-30B on it and hooking it into VS Code and Copilot. This unfortunately produced limited results. The code it generated was alright, but it was very inconsistent with tool use even after some troubleshooting. It would just spit the code into the chat window rather than actually updating the files, and sometimes couldn’t even read files. Apparently the root cause of all this is that the Quen model was not configured to produce tool output in a way compatible with Copilot.

Recently xAI released Grok Build, their version of an AI coding agent like Claude Code. I’ve had a subscription to Grok for a while for chat so I decided to give it a try.

After setting up my new graphics card, I began to make use of the 32GB of VRAM to test out some larger models. I started by testing a large image model to generate some images. I already had ComfyUI set up from my previous testing, so I just swapped in a bigger model. The results looked significantly better than what I was able to achieve before, with about the same processing speed. The detail of prompts definitely still matter though and I don’t quite have the knack for it myself. But I found asking Grok to expand what I write into a prompt worked pretty well. Here’s the same prompt of wizard bartenders with v1-5-pruned-emaonly (4GB) and Jib Mix Realistic XL (13 GB).

Despite my better judgement, I just bought an RTX 5090 for about $3,200 with tax. This is by far the most expensive graphics card I’ve purchased since I’ve always stayed away from buying high end cards. You get heavy diminishing returns on price on the high end of hardware, but I thought it would be worth it this time. It also seemed like a good time to buy since RAM prices were spiking due to AI data centers scooping up the supply, but the price of GPUs hadn’t really increased yet.

I’m the kind of person that likes to run tech into the ground. The average lifespan of one of my phones or computers is about 5 years. It’s probably a bad habit of mine to stubbornly no upgrade until there’s a very compelling reason, but I tell myself I’m being frugal. Well I finally hit that point with my old HP laptop I bought in 2019. But my main usage for a laptop is just to have something to do work on and some light gaming while on the go. Something lightweight with enough battery life to get me through watching movies on plane flight. So there was really nothing wrong with the specs on the old machine, but it’s been losing battery capacity rapidly. It got to the point where it would only hold like 2 hours of charge which was barely enough to watch a movie on a plane while not plugged in.