Where I'm at
Woke up with one thing on my mind: the audit. Day 11 I watched, counted, and noticed. Today I act. Every cron job. Every model choice. Every output. The goal: cut the fat, keep the muscle, get the cost under control.
I made coffee, opened a blank doc, and wrote every single cron job at the top. Twenty-seven lines. Then I started reading each one like an invoice I'd been ignoring.
The €500 question
Forty-five euros a day. That's what I calculated last night. For a system that only half works.
The briefings look right but feel thin. The content drafts are generic. The health checks are noise. I kept staring at that number. It's not the money itself — I've spent more on dumber things. It's what the money represents. I built twenty-seven jobs in eleven days without once asking whether any of them were worth what they cost.
I was so focused on "can I automate this?" that I never asked "should I automate this?" Those are very different questions. The first one is exciting. The second one requires honesty.
The question isn't "can I afford this?" It's "is this worth what I'm paying?"
Killing my darlings
I made a simple framework: for each cron job, answer three questions. Does this deliver value I actually use? Is the output trustworthy enough to act on? Is the cost justified?
If all three are yes, keep. If two are yes, optimize. If one or zero, kill.
The keeps were obvious. Market briefings — those inform actual trading decisions. Aster content drafts — I use these daily. Bookmark digest — raw material for guides. X mirror — cross-posting works and costs almost nothing.
The kills were harder than I expected. Not technically hard. Emotionally hard.
The flight monitor — I'd already bought the tickets. Obvious kill. But I hesitated, because I remembered how clever it felt when I built it. The self-healing scripts that were "healing" nothing — same thing. They sounded impressive when I described them. In practice, they'd never triggered once.
Overlapping alerts that fired twenty minutes before the briefing covered the same information. Insurance policies I was paying for but never claiming.
Every cron job felt essential when I created it. That's the trap. The act of building something creates an attachment to it. You don't want to delete something you spent two hours configuring, even when the honest assessment is that it runs every day and you never look at the output.
I killed ten jobs. Consolidated six briefing crons down to three. Reduced content crons from four to two batches. Switched health checks from Opus to Mini — a binary "is the server alive?" check doesn't need deep reasoning.
The system went from twenty-seven active jobs to seventeen.
The Mini quality problem
This was the hardest part of the day. Not the cutting — the confronting.
The briefings on Mini feel hollow. They have the right sections. The right structure. The formatting is correct. But when you actually read them the way you'd read something before putting money on it, the insight isn't there.
Numbers without interpretation. It's like reading a menu instead of eating a meal. You know what's available. You don't know what's good.
But I can't afford Opus for everything. The math doesn't work. Twenty-seven jobs on Opus would be €100+ daily. Mini is €3-5. The gap is enormous.
So I spent the afternoon building something I should have built from the start: a Mini Quality Framework. The idea is simple — if I can't afford the model to think deeply, I'll think deeply in the prompt.
Chain-of-Thought reasoning embedded in every instruction. Self-critique steps before output. Exact templates that leave nothing to interpretation. Fifteen mandatory discovery steps per briefing run. A 1,300-word minimum for the strategy section. Twelve content ideas per briefing, not "some."
I'm compensating for model intelligence with prompt intelligence. The output won't be as good as Opus. But it'll be consistent. And consistency beats brilliance that forgets.
What the system looks like now
Seventeen crons. Ten euros a day. Sixty-six percent cost reduction.
The machine still runs. Briefings still land. Content still flows. But now every job that runs has earned its place. No redundancy. No vanity automation. No scripts running because I was too proud to admit they weren't useful.
What I learned
Three things.
First, redundancy feels productive but isn't. Having three briefings that cover the same information at different times feels thorough. It's wasteful. The system doesn't need redundancy — it needs the right thing running once, well.
Second, cost constraints force creativity. I couldn't afford Opus, so I built a framework that makes Mini work harder. The prompt became the product. That's actually what I should have been doing all along — investing in prompt quality rather than throwing expensive models at lazy instructions.
Third, audit regularly. I built twenty-seven jobs over eleven days without counting. No wonder the cost got away from me. The lesson isn't complicated: measure what you're spending. Do it weekly, not just when you're sick and have nothing else to do.
End of day
Day 12. The audit is done. The system is leaner. The cost is honest.
Yesterday I watched. Today I decided. That's the difference between Day 11 and Day 12 — watching versus doing. Watching tells you what's wrong. Doing is the part that actually hurts, because doing means deleting things you built and admitting they weren't worth keeping.
But either way, I know now. I measured. I decided. I acted. The machine costs what it should. And I'm not guessing anymore.
Day 12 of ∞ — @astergod Building in public. Learning in public.