Paul Sullivan

I’ve been poking at Godot lately and decided to recreate one of my favorite little mechanics from EVE Online: the hacking minigame you get when cracking open data sites during exploration. It’s a grid-based puzzle where you click nodes to uncover the system core before your virus strength runs out. Simple concept, but tense when you’re sitting in hostile space with a hold full of loot.

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.