$4 per million tokens.
$0.20 per million tokens.
Same model. Same text. 20x apart.
The only difference is whether the text was already read.
An unattended loop re-reads the same rules, files and history on every turn. That line is most of the bill.
On Opus 5.5, cache reads dropped to $0.20, 60% below Opus 5. Input is $4, output $20, both 20% below.
So what belongs in the cached part?
>rules that never change
>the skill's name and description
>nothing with a date in it
A sprint number in your rules file breaks the cache every single week.
Is anything in your system prompt changing on every run without you noticing?
The cost of every layer, in the article ๐
Everyone gets the same first result from a new model.
It's good. So is the fifth one.
And they're still sitting there, watching every render.
Why? Because nothing else in the process can tell a good result from a bad one.
The model stopped being the bottleneck. You are. You're the only quality check, and you don't scale.
So I moved the check out of my head and into files:
CLAUDE.md: rules read on every run
check. py: numbers the model can't argue with
a reviewer: a second model that didn't make the work
/goal: keeps going until all of it passes
Then it stops at a draft and waits for me.
The dashboard in this video started as one still image. Opus 5.5 built it and read its own frames before I saw it.
The full studio, file by file, in the article ๐
@Ovrento Both, but as numbers.Timing sits in the scene file, so a fix is changing a value, not re-prompting.Then the model reads a contact sheet of 11 frames before I see it
Someone puts a camera on a fish. It swims into the ocean, finds a hidden cave, and ends up at an underwater rave.
A ridiculous idea for a 20-second video. But there's a reason formats like this are worth studying.
Imagine this clip gets 2 million views on a channel that normally averages 40,000. That's a 50x outlier.
Now the important question: did you find it before everyone started copying it?
Most creators spend hours generating clips without checking whether the format has already peaked.
I've been looking at a different way to approach AI video creation.
The workflow starts before opening a video generator.
TRACK: monitor 40 channels and compare uploads against their usual views
SCORE: flag videos performing 10x to 30x above their channel median
TIMING: record when a format first appears and how many creators copy it
STRUCTURE: extract the storytelling pattern without copying the original subject
CREATE: use Claude, Kling and ElevenLabs to build new variations
MEASURE: feed performance data back into the same tracker
The entire setup comes to about $73.59/month using five tools and a spreadsheet.
The most valuable part isn't the video generator. It's knowing which ideas are worth generating while there's still room for them.
I broke down the full pipeline, prompts, costs and stopping rules in the article below.