Scoby: I built a free Kimchi

Kimchi’s shape (plan, build, judge, three models) on free inference APIs. What free actually means, why compaction had to be turned inside out, and why the cheapest checkpoint is still a person reading the plan.

Kimchi's terminal UI on first launch in the brew-buddy repo — the opening prompt reads 'hi kimchi welcome to my homelab. My name is Janos and i'd like to try you'

I gave Kimchi my kombucha app

Same builder model, same task, two harness modes — a real feature on my homelab, and why the architecture, not a smarter model, decided every outcome that mattered.