One thing people underrate about the smart zone: It's a great way to save on tokens. When you're in the dumb zone, sending 600K tokens on every request gets expensive FAST Yes, you get charged for cache hits. Less, but it still adds up.↗

About $500 in Opus 4.6 tokens and $50 in GPT 5.4. This included a couple of re-runs as I refined the prompt. Eventually used GPT 5.4 to refine the results, dedupe some events, tighten descriptions, etc. But the first shot was good enough and it was certainly < $100. Probably GPT…↗