AI agents
4 articles about "AI agents".
7 months after my "$0/month AI agents" post: what it costs now
A follow-up to my March post about running a one-person company on Gemini's free tier for $0 a month. The free setup is gone; the main bill is now two Claude subscriptions at about $400 a month. What runs now, what I cut, MindThread's MRR, and three problems I haven't solved.
Several Claude sessions, one GPU: a cross-process render lock in a single file
Two autopilots and a handful of manual experiments all need the same RTX 3080 for voice and rendering. We wrote a 183-line file lock in Node: atomic create with 'wx', queue instead of skip, a heartbeat every 5 minutes, self-clearing when the pid is gone or the heartbeat is 90 minutes stale, and only ever deleting your own lock. Design reasoning, code, and the 9-minute wait on its first night.
Three experiments to cut our AI video pipeline's cost: one passed, one passed with conditions, one failed
We classified every turn of our AI Shorts pipeline's Claude usage and found the money was in rework, not writing. Then we ran three experiments: record the voice first (US$0.76 down to US$0.17 per video), lower the reviewer's reasoning effort (medium saves about 30%, low lets real problems through), and draft with Sonnet (34% cheaper, factual errors 4 to 1, not adopted). Includes how we seeded errors for a blind test and the mistake we made ourselves.
Letting agents produce our YouTube Shorts: about 250k tokens and $3 a video, from four real runs
We turned our Shorts pipeline into a weekly unattended run: pick topics, render, mechanical checks, AI review, schedule. A human replies to one weekly report. Here is the token ledger from four real runs: 514k for the first video, 254k and a first-round pass for the fourth after we added mechanical checks before review, and why the savings came from fewer redos rather than a cheaper model.