AI Pricing Is Becoming UX
GPT-5.6 turns capability into a price ladder, while Codex Spark turns speed into a separate button. AI pricing is becoming part of the interface.
Read the pieceKahWee Teng · Staff software engineer
Complex systems deserve clear thinking.
I work on frontend systems and developer experience, then write about what the diagrams leave out: migrations, performance, AI-assisted engineering, and the tradeoffs that make software last.
Bearings
KahWee in 30 seconds
- Role
- Staff software engineer
- Focus
- Frontend systems + developer experience
- Journal
- 88 field notes since 2016
- Perspective
- Singapore → San Francisco
Working terrain
Experience, shown through the work.
Three recurring questions guide this journal: how systems change, how tools change the work, and what survives outside a demo.
01 · Systems
Make migrations legible
React, TypeScript, performance, and framework changes measured in real implementation work.
Follow the frontend route 02 · PracticeTest the work around AI
Agents matter, but so do review habits, cost controls, context, and the harness around the model.
Follow the AI practice route 03 · FieldworkPrefer evidence to demos
Cloudflare, self-hosting, and home infrastructure observed where constraints are harder to hide.
Follow the infrastructure routeTrailhead
Selected work and thinking
A short route through the archive: measured comparisons, difficult migrations, and lessons that still hold.
TanStack Table v9 Trades Monoliths for Explicit Feature Trees
Upgrading TanStack Table v8 to v9 cuts rendering time by 28% on 5,000-row tables. The real migration effort lives in TypeScript generic boundaries.
Read the pieceMigrating from Remix to React Router v7 - Part 1
My Remix-to-React Router v7 migration touched 40 files and removed 591 net lines. Imports were easy; TypeScript took the time.
Read the pieceWhy Adobe Animate's Flash-to-HTML5 Bridge Failed
Adobe Animate kept the Flash timeline alive for HTML5, but the web moved on. Maintenance mode confirms the bridge could not hold.
Read the pieceFrom the trail
Latest field notes
AI Pricing Is Becoming UX
GPT-5.6 turns capability into a price ladder, while Codex Spark turns speed into a separate button. AI pricing is becoming part of the interface.
TanStack Table v9 Trades Monoliths for Explicit Feature Trees
Upgrading TanStack Table v8 to v9 cuts rendering time by 28% on 5,000-row tables. The real migration effort lives in TypeScript generic boundaries.
React Router v8 Learned to Make Upgrades Boring
React Router v8 keeps the framework-mode API familiar and moves v7's future flags into defaults. That restraint matters after an expensive v6-to-v7 migration.
Claude’s Guardrails End at Claude
Closed-model guardrails remain tied to the provider, even as comparable open weights spread. Public safety needs controls that survive that reality.
AI-Generated Code Review: What Reviewers Should Still Block
Models make awkward code cheaper to replace. Review should block future risk and leave private ideas of neat to automated conventions.
The Best Coding Agent Is the One You Can Keep Using
Grok Build produces useful patches, but its weekly limit changes how I use it. The harness and quota now matter more than the model.