TOKENS: 0

STUCK IN THE
CLAW HOLE

You've been here for hours. The claw never grabs.
But maybe THIS prompt will work…

Working Agent
Error Handling
Documentation
Token Budget
Prompt That Works
Production Ready
INSERT TOKEN >

SESSION COST

$0.00
and counting…
0
Prompts Tried
0
Tokens Burned
0
Agents Spawned
0
Hours Wasted

SELECT DIFFICULTY

EASY
Use a Library
npm install hope
Import someone else's abstractions. Pray they maintained it past the initial hype cycle.
Est. cost: $12 • Est. time: 2 days • Works: sometimes
MEDIUM
Build From Scratch
Write your own orchestration layer. Rediscover every problem the library authors already solved. Feel briefly superior.
Est. cost: $340 • Est. time: 3 weeks • Works: in demo
HARD
Roll Your Own LLM
Fine-tune a model on your Slack messages. Deploy it on a GPU you can't afford. Call it "proprietary AI."
Est. cost: $48,000 • Est. time: 6 months • Works: on that one test
IMPOSSIBLE
Make It Reliable
Ship an agent to production that works every time, handles edge cases, and stays within budget. LOL.
Est. cost: your sanity • Est. time: ??? • Works: lmao

CLAW HOLE SURVIVORS

( none of them actually survived )

I just need to tweak one more system prompt and it'll be perfect. I can feel it.
— Junior Developer, hour 47
The agent ALMOST worked that time. It only hallucinated three API endpoints and one database.
— Senior Engineer, $4,000 in API calls later
I could have built this with a bash script. I could have built this with a bash script. I could have—
— Tech Lead, in denial, rocking gently
My agent works great! It just costs $200 per request and takes 45 seconds. But the ARCHITECTURE is beautiful.
— Solutions Architect, has never checked the bill
We pivoted from 'AI-powered' to 'AI-assisted' to 'AI-adjacent' to 'has heard of AI.'
— Product Manager, updating the pitch deck
The demo worked flawlessly in front of the CEO. We have not been able to reproduce this result.
— CTO, demo-driven development

THE 5 STAGES OF
AGENT DEVELOPMENT

1. Denial
"This will only take a weekend. I just need a prompt, a model, and a for loop. How hard can orchestration be?"
2. Anger
"WHY is it calling the same tool SEVENTEEN TIMES? I LITERALLY told it not to. IN ALL CAPS. In the SYSTEM PROMPT."
3. Bargaining
"Okay, what if I add 'you are an expert' to the prompt? What if I add chain-of-thought? What if I add a meta-agent that supervises the agent?"
4. Depression
"I have 847 lines of prompt. The token cost per request is $2.40. My agent's main skill is confidently doing the wrong thing."
5. Acceptance
"It works 70% of the time. We're shipping it. The other 30% is a 'feature' we call 'creative autonomy.'"