Short answer: the core LinkedQL live query engine runs on the backend today, and there’s an embeddable variant (FlashQL) that runs directly in the frontend with the same LinkedQL capabilities – live queries, DeepRefs, etc.
1. Pure frontend / local data
For data that can live entirely on the client, you can spin up an in-browser FlashQL instance:
const client = new FlashQL(); // runs in the page / worker
await client.query(`
CREATE TABLE users (
id UUID PRIMARY KEY,
name TEXT
)
`);
// Live query works the same way as on the backend:
const result = await client.query(
'SELECT * FROM users',
{ live: true }
);
From there, result is a live result set: inserts/updates/deletes that match the query will show up in the rows, and all the same features (live queries, DeepRefs, etc.) behave as they do on a backend instance.
At the moment FlashQL is in-memory only; persistence backends like IndexedDB / LocalStorage are on the roadmap.
2. Remote database from the frontend
If your source of truth is a remote Postgres/MySQL instance, the model we’re building is:
a LinkedQL engine next to the database, and
a FlashQL instance in the frontend that federates/syncs with that backend engine.
Implementing rate limiting in a scalable manner is harder than just making logging faster, and it makes the cloud provider money whereas rate limiting causes them to make less money. The incentive makes it pretty clear what side of the tradeoff cloud providers are going to come down on.
Last month, a single container in my GKE cluster (Sao Paulo region) entered an error loop, outputting to stdout at ~2k logs/second.
I discovered the hard way that GKE's default behavior is to ingest 100% of this into Cloud Logging with no rate limiting.
My bill jumped nearly 1000% before alerts caught it.
It might sound smart your defense of Google but VSCode is not a fork or electron and chromium, there's a lot of work there, not just clicking a fork button
For me it's about the value-to-token ratio feeling off, as I stated in another comment.
> What bugs me most is that many of those 340M tokens feel wasteful? Like the LLM will use 50k tokens exploring dead ends before finding a solution that could have been expressed in 5k tokens. The productivity gain is real, but it feels like I'm paying 10x more than what should be "fair" for the actual value delivered.
Thanks for the input! I'm checking on Claude Code Max now - from what I'm seeing, even the $200/month plan has weekly rate limits (240-480 hours of Sonnet 4, 24-40 hours of Opus 4 per week).. so not quite unlimited tokens either, though definitely more predictable billing.
$638/6 weeks won't make me broke, but here's my main issue: for me it's about the value-to-token ratio feeling off.
What bugs me most is that many of those 340M tokens feel wasteful? Like the LLM will use 50k tokens exploring dead ends before finding a solution that could have been expressed in 5k tokens. The productivity gain is real, but it feels like I'm paying 10x more than what should be "fair" for the actual value delivered.
Maybe this is just the current state of AI coding - the models need that exploration space to get to the answer. Or maybe I need to get better at constraining the context and being more surgical with my prompts.
For me as a founder, it's less "can I afford this" and more "does this pricing model make sense long-term?" If AI coding becomes a $5-6k/year baseline expense per developer, that changes a lot of unit economics, especially for early-stage companies.
Are you finding Claude Code Max more token-efficient for similar tasks, or is it just easier to stomach because the billing is flat?
i think when you are testing out ideas you cannot also be thinking about how efficient that is. it doesn't make a lot of sense unless the problem you are trying to solve is efficiency. So like, I get your point, but I don't think anyone is wasting tokens, the LLM explores different solutions and arrives at ones that work. You seem to not want to pay for the tokens used on bad solutions, but they were useful to find the actual solutions. I also think that there are plenty of software licenses that we pay for in my work that are multiple times 5-6k/year and yet all our software is much cheaper than the salaries that cover our developers. Good developer tools are always worth it imo.
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