The local machine
38 plates, 7 sprites
Plates from 21:43 to 21:56, sprites by 21:58, and 28 ambience beds around 22:00. Voice lines were produced between 22:17 and 22:25.
Real-time film · 20:26 · production notes · 8 to 9 October 2026
The Wrong Speed Plants
A twenty-minute, twenty-six-second documentary about the strange lives of plants, drawn as a living nineteenth-century natural-history folio, with a clock stating each plate’s speed and a Sceptic’s red pencil keeping the claims honest. Twenty-three agents built it in under four hours. This is where the time and the money went.
The session in four numbers
From a brainstorm to a published documentary
3 h 43 minfrom the brief at 21:07 to the final report at 00:49
26 h 45 minof agent working time, run in parallel
23 agentsthree Opus, ten Sonnet and ten Haiku
$181.18if every call had been billed at API list prices
20:26 film9 chapters52 shots119 lines, 2,882 words3 voices51 sources38 plates28 ambience beds11,600 lines of film code9 research notes
The night
21:07 to 00:49
Each bar is one agent, from its first instruction to its last report; each thin mark is a tool call. The four local rows mark every picture, sprite, voice line and ambience bed the machine produced. Nine researchers started together, the folio engine was built while they worked, and the eight plate animators and the composer followed.
Opus 5.5Sonnet 5.5Haiku 5.5Local machine, no API cost
The company
Who did what, for how long, at what price
| Agent and assignment | Ran (local) | Time | API calls | Tool calls | Cost at list prices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Director · Opus 5.5 | |||||
| Director: orchestration, review and export | 21:07–00:49 | 3 h 43 min | 258 | 276 | $41.18 |
| Folio drawing engine · Opus 5.5 | |||||
| Build the folio drawing engine | 21:31–22:49 | 1 h 18 min | 116 | 127 | $21.11 |
| Prologue animation · Opus 5.5 | |||||
| Animate c00 prologue (Opus) | 22:51–00:05 | 1 h 15 min | 137 | 176 | $15.10 |
| Score · Sonnet 5.5 | |||||
| Compose the film's score in code | 22:20–00:13 | 1 h 52 min | 119 | 133 | $9.52 |
| Tooling · Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 | |||||
| Adapt smoke test and cue checker | 22:53–23:26 | 33 min | 24 | 40 | $0.85 |
| Merge studio tooling into worktree | 21:19–21:57 | 38 min | 115 | 119 | $3.89 |
| Research · Haiku 5.5 | |||||
| Research: plant senses | 21:19–22:01 | 42 min | 19 | 58 | $0.60 |
| Research: roots and networks | 21:19–22:23 | 1 h 05 min | 23 | 68 | $0.85 |
| Research: the plant intelligence debate | 21:19–21:58 | 40 min | 18 | 72 | $0.75 |
| Research: plant warning signals | 21:19–22:15 | 57 min | 25 | 75 | $0.74 |
| Research: fast plants and clocks | 21:19–22:06 | 47 min | 22 | 84 | $0.72 |
| Research: plant memory | 21:19–22:12 | 53 min | 31 | 67 | $0.61 |
| Research: plant mimics and liars | 21:19–22:13 | 54 min | 19 | 72 | $0.61 |
| Research: Venus flytrap counting | 21:19–21:54 | 35 min | 27 | 78 | $0.63 |
| Research: Darwin and plant time | 21:19–22:10 | 52 min | 59 | 67 | $0.81 |
| Animation, eight plates · Sonnet 5.5 | |||||
| Animate c08 The Argument | 22:51–00:18 | 1 h 27 min | 216 | 227 | $13.38 |
| Animate c01 Twenty Senses | 22:51–00:03 | 1 h 12 min | 162 | 180 | $9.67 |
| Animate c02 Counting | 22:51–23:59 | 1 h 09 min | 161 | 189 | $9.04 |
| Animate c05 The Hidden Half | 22:51–00:14 | 1 h 23 min | 208 | 216 | $13.31 |
| Animate c04 The Alarm | 22:51–00:03 | 1 h 13 min | 172 | 186 | $8.77 |
| Animate c07 The Clock | 22:51–00:07 | 1 h 16 min | 154 | 161 | $10.62 |
| Animate c03 Memory | 22:51–23:52 | 1 h 01 min | 142 | 156 | $8.46 |
| Animate c06 Liars | 22:51–00:11 | 1 h 21 min | 152 | 165 | $9.98 |
| 23 agents | 2,379 | 2,992 | $181.18 | ||
The bill
Where $181.18 went
By role
Director · $41.18 · 23%Orchestration, the script with its 51 sources, review of every plate, export and publishing.
Folio engine · $21.11 · 12%The drawing engine that inks, washes and turns the pages.
Prologue animator · $15.10 · 8%Darwin’s dots and the opening, which also found the engine bug.
Composer · $9.52 · 5%A chamber piece around a ticking clock, from 820 animator cues.
2 tooling agents · $4.73 · 3%Studio tools merged into the worktree, and the smoke test and cue checker adapted.
9 Haiku researchers · $6.32 · 3%One research note each, finished before the animators started.
8 plate animators · $83.22 · 46%One Sonnet agent for each of the eight plates.
By model
By kind of token
The director, hour by hour
Each gap between two transcript events is given to the tool call or message that ended it, then sorted by tool name, file path and command. The buckets are keyword matches, so read them as proportions. 2 h 22 min in all.
The animators
How long each part took
The composer is the longest bar because the score reads every animator cue, so it could only finish once the animators had.
Eight plates, the prologue and the score
The film
What the night produced
Three voices
119 lines
The narrator, af_heart at 0.9, speaks 104 lines; the Sceptic, bm_george at 0.95, speaks 12; Darwin, bm_fable at 0.88, speaks 3. Each line has its source beside it in the script.
The score
820 cues
A chamber piece around a ticking clock, rendered from the animators’ cues. It runs 1,223.74 seconds, matching the lock exactly, with chapters within 1.6 dB of each other, a deliberately quieter finale and no clipped samples.
The MP4
20:26, 722 MB
1376 by 768 at 30 fps, with a 98 MB share copy and a 44 MB single-file page. Exported in 90-second chunks, three at a time, at CRF 21 with denoise.
What the checks caught
Five findings and what was done
The prologue animator found a bug that touched every transition, the whole-film tests came back clean, and the remaining weak spots were flagged in the hand-over instead of hidden.
| Found | What it was | How it was handled |
|---|---|---|
| Engine: wash hand-overs | Every wash drew its tide-line texture as a small thumbnail in the top-left corner, found by the prologue animator | Fixed centrally in the engine, which affected all 31 washes |
| Smoke test and scan | 17,318 frames and 130 million canvas calls across 52 shots and 51 hand-overs | Clean; a browser pass found no console errors |
| Code-drawn props | The bladderwort trap is simple and the plastic plant is deliberately garish, both flatter than the engravings | Left, and flagged to the user |
| Glyphs | “≈” and “→” fall back to a system font | Left, and flagged to the user |
| Chapter cards | One or two shots sit briefly empty while a chapter card clears | Left, and flagged to the user |
Accuracy
Six claims the research corrected
Every narrated fact traces to a source, and 51 are listed in the player’s Sources panel. The research changed these claims from the brainstorm before they reached the script.
| Claim in the brainstorm | What the research found | Handling |
|---|---|---|
| A glowing calcium wave in tomato | The filmed wave was in thale cress | Changed in the script |
| Tobacco summons the exact wasp | The documented story is maize and its parasitic wasps | Changed in the script |
| Corydalis hiding from diggers | A different plant: the lily is Fritillaria delavayi | Changed in the script |
| Winter wheat switching a gene off over winter | The case is thale cress | Changed in the script |
| Mimosa shaking as a control | Not confirmed | Left out of the film |
| Acacia trees warning each other | Half true: the tannin rise was measured, but the warning gas and the antelope deaths were never tested | Changed in the script |
What it taught
Six things the numbers say
The score was the slowest agent
The Sonnet composer ran 1 h 52 min, longer than any plate animator (1 h 01 min to 1 h 27 min), because it waited on the animators’ 820 cues. It reported at 00:13, and the last plate, The Argument, at 00:18.
Two Opus agents cost a fifth of the bill
The folio engine ($21.11) and the prologue animator ($15.10) cost $36.21, 20% of the total, and they built the pieces every other agent drew with.
Research on Haiku was nearly free
Nine Haiku researchers cost $6.32 between them and were all finished by 22:23, before the animators started at 22:51. Their findings corrected six claims in the brainstorm.
The director read sources more than it did anything else
Research, script and brief took 20 min of the director’s time, ahead of export (11 min) and the score (11 min), because every line has its source beside it. 1 h 08 min went on waiting for agents.
A busy machine did not stop the export
Fifty-six headless browsers from another session’s film were running when the plates came in. The export ran in 90-second chunks, three at a time, with automatic retries in case another session’s clean-up killed a browser.
Cost per finished minute
At $8.87 it sits between Gears to Silicon ($7.56) and the $13 films, and well under the original Promethean ($50.83).
Method
How these figures were measured
Measured from the session's own transcripts: the director's, and one for each of the 22 agents it launched. Assistant messages are deduplicated by message id and the last entry's usage is kept. Models come from each agent's metadata.
Cost is what the usage would have cost at API list prices in October 2026: Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, Sonnet 5.5 at $2 and $10, Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 and $0.50 (higher rates above a 100,000-token prompt), cache reads at 0.05 times input, cache writes at 1.25 times (five minutes) or 2 times (one hour). A subscription session was not billed this way, so treat the dollar figures as a measure of work, not an invoice.
Times are UK local time (BST, UTC+1). Local-machine marks are the modification times of the generated files. The corrections table, the test results and the machine-load note come from the director’s own messages and final report in the session. The hour-by-hour split sorts tool calls by keyword, and gaps of more than 20 minutes with no events are left out of it.