The local machine
8 plates
Generated plates of the tracing floor, the girih tilework, an Isfahan dome with its depth map, Chartres and Rosslyn, plus 3 ambience beds and 9 voice lines.
Real-time film · 2:47 · production notes · 16 October 2026
The Compass and the Cathedral
A two-minute, forty-seven-second film about sacred geometry in real buildings: one unbroken compass radius constructing Islamic girih stars, a Gothic rose window and Scottish carved stonework, drawn line by line until the building appears. It was made in a single Cursor chat in about forty minutes. This is what the log shows.
The session in four numbers
From a request to a published film
40 minfrom the request at 19:33 to the chat’s last message at 20:13
128tool calls by one agent, with no subagents
2,217lines added across 15 files
no costCursor logged no token usage for this chat
2:47 film1920×10804 chapters8 shots8 lines, 369 wordsam_fenrir narrator8 plates3 ambience beds1,140 lines of film code
The evening
19:30 to 20:20
Each thin mark in the first row is a tool call; the second row is every moment the agent wrote code; the third is your messages. The local rows mark each picture, voice line and ambience bed the machine produced, with the voice lines and plates generated in the first half hour.
Cursor agent, gemini-4-argonCode and messagesLocal machine, no API cost
The log
What Cursor kept
What the agent did
Counted from the tool-call records in Cursor’s own store. Nearly all the work was reading, then editing and running the build.
What Cursor recorded
Cursor keeps the context size but writes zero for input and output tokens, so no dollar figure can be derived. The page shows what was measured and leaves the bill out.
The film
What the evening produced
One narrator
8 lines
369 words read by am_fenrir at 0.95, one line to each shot.
The score
Code and YuE2
A Pythagorean chamber score in D Dorian, with lute and harp plucks on the compass strikes, string and organ fifths and stone and chalk percussion, backed by YuE2 acoustic instruments.
The MP4
167.0 s, 91 MB
1920 by 1080, native, with a 9.6 MB single-file page and a review page. The final message says the build and verification had finished cleanly; the audio was not heard by the agent.
What review found
Seven findings across three passes
The review log names each defect with the frames that showed it, then the fix.
| Found | What went wrong | How it was fixed |
|---|---|---|
| Pass 0: the compass | Drawn as flat 2D strokes, with no bevelled legs, locking screw, shadow on the slate or chalk dust | A 3D bevelled brass divider with highlights, steel needle tips, a drop shadow and chalk particles |
| Pass 0: the reveals | An empty dark void before each plate, which then faded in through a circular clip | Plates now open cell by cell through the closed polygons of the geometry |
| Pass 0: anchors | Generic spoke counts that did not match the plates (12-fold, 16-fold, 12-fold, a boss at a measured point) | Every construction aligned to coordinates measured from the plates and kept in anchors.json |
| Pass 0: the Apprentice Pillar | Flat sine waves with no unrolled geometry | An unrolled bed-mould panel that wraps into counter-winding helices, and a final convergence shot |
| Pass 1: the slate | A null image made drawUnderplate paint an opaque rectangle over the slate table, rope and chisels in shots 1 and 2 | Fixed, with a subtle blueprint tint over the slab |
| Pass 1: callouts | Leader lines from targets on the right ran behind a left-docked label | The nearest perimeter edge with an orthogonal elbow, so no line crosses text |
| Pass 1: line finish | Single-stroke girih strapwork and mullions | Cased double lines, etched slate grooves under chalk, and volumetric glass shafts |
What it taught
Five things the log says
Forty minutes from request to MP4
The request came in at 19:33 and the MP4 was written at 20:07, with the chat’s last message at 20:13. It is the shortest film of the set measured here, at 2:47 and eight shots.
One agent, no subagents, mostly reading
All 128 tool calls came from a single agent. 72 of them, 56%, read files, to learn the pipeline and the documentation before writing 2,217 lines.
Three passes on the representative sample
The review log records a functional draft and two enhancement passes, each with named defects and the evidence frames, before the film was packed.
The film is drawn almost entirely in code
Eight painted plates carry the places, and the compass, the construction lines, the reveals and the callouts are drawn live on top, which is why the code is the main product of the chat.
No bill to report
Cursor logged the context (46% of 200,000 tokens at the end) and not the tokens, so this page can say how long the work took and what it did, and cannot say what it cost.
Method
How these figures were measured
Measured from Cursor's own stores: the chat's record in the global state.vscdb (one record per message, with its creation time and the tool it called) and the AI-code tracking database, which timestamps every line of code the agent wrote. User message times come from the chat transcript. The chat has 176 message records from 19:33 to 20:13 and 128 tool calls.
There is no cost on this page. Cursor writes zero for input and output tokens in these records and keeps only the size of the context, so the list-price figures used on the other pages cannot be worked out. The model name is the one Cursor recorded.
Times are UK local time (BST, UTC+1). Local-machine marks are the modification times of the generated files. The defects and fixes come from the project’s own review log. The 2:47 length, shot count and file sizes come from the project files.