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
- 92 field notes since 2016
- Perspective
- Singapore → San Francisco
Working terrain
Experience, shown through the work.
Four recurring questions, each grounded in a piece that shows the decisions, evidence, and tradeoffs behind it.
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 piece
Why 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
Optimizing Cubbly After Moving Away from SSR
I compared Cubbly's SSR and client-rendered startup options, measured their trade-offs, and used the results to choose a simpler architecture that reaches useful content sooner.
Adding French Made Me Remove React SSR From Cubbly
Adding French exposed an unnecessary React SSR bridge. Removing it simplified Cubbly, but useful inventory content arrived later.
I Moved This Blog to pnpm, Then Found npm Everywhere
The lockfile and CI moved to pnpm in one commit. The harder part was removing the npm instructions that kept telling people and agents to move backward.
Five Hermes Agent Patterns I Wish I Had Started With
The Hermes patterns that work in practice: deterministic watchdogs, scheduled research, reusable skills, Telegram delivery, WhatsApp tradeoffs, and safer tool boundaries.