Here's something I noticed about myself.
I never ask for an image.
I say — show me a mockup of the checkout screen.
Draw me the flow we just talked about.
Imagine the person who'd actually pay for this.
Three requests for a picture.
Not one of them has the word picture in it.
And I wanted Claude to just get that.
Someone had already built it, by the way.
Good plugin.
Worked fine.
But picture the config file.
One line.
One model name.
You set it once, when you install it.
So think about what that means.
I want the expensive model for the final thing.
And I want the cheap one for the twenty rough drafts I'll throw away getting there.
I can have one.
Not both.
The one decision that needed making every single time — was the one thing nailed down at install.
So, one knob.
Small, mid, pro.
The agent picks, per request.
And the gap between those is ridiculous.
Cheap tier, half a cent a picture.
Top tier — twenty-one.
Thirty-five times.
Put it this way.
Those twenty throwaway drafts?
Four dollars twenty-two at the wrong setting.
Twelve cents at the right one.
Now here's the bit I didn't see coming.
It worked.
And because it worked, I used it constantly.
You know that feeling when something stops being annoying, so you just...
do it more?
That's lovely, right up until a loop runs away overnight and you find out in the morning.
Which is why there's a spending cap, checked before the call goes out.
Not after the money's gone.
But this is the one that actually changed the design.
Imagine you've got a picture you love.
A character, say.
And a week later you want her again — same face, just a bit older.
Except you never wrote that prompt.
Claude did.
And it's gone, somewhere in a chat log.
Do you know what I actually ended up doing?
I handed the picture back to Claude and asked it to guess what the prompt had been.
Forensics.
On my own artwork.
So now every image drops a little hidden file beside it with the whole recipe inside.
Same one, warmer — that's a command now, not an investigation.
If you build anything on top of an agent, take this bit.
Do not teach every skill about models and prices.
Have one engine that knows all of it, and let everything else just ask, in plain words.
Something needs a picture?
It says — high quality, transparent background, tall and thin.
And the engine works out which model does transparency, what tier that is, and what it'll cost.
Before it spends anything.
The skill says what it wants.
The engine says what that costs.
It wasn't all clever, mind.
One Tuesday in April I lost the entire day.
Eight releases.
Six different approaches.
Trying to get a config value through to the server.
Every attempt failed identically — the server just never started.
No error.
No log line.
Nothing at all.
Ninth release, I gave up and reverted it.
And here's how it ended up.
I set out to build an image generator, and I accidentally built a dependency.
Four skills on my machine can't work without it now.
The one that makes App Store screenshots.
The one that writes.
The one that films demos.
None of them know a single thing about models or money.
They just ask.
Including this.
The voice you're listening to right now is mine, cloned, running on my own machine, and it cost nothing.
And I didn't write the prompt for any of it.