A dev's Claude Code agents looped for 5 hours last month. $47K bill. No budget limits, no kill switch.
A 5-stage pipeline around Claude Code. Budget limits that can't be bypassed, quality gates that run before you see anything, and memory that grows between sessions.
Everything below was shipped solo by Michael Lip
140+ PRs merged at GoogleChrome, axios, nicehash. 55+ vulnerability reports filed.
10 live products, all built with this pipeline
Stripe ships 1,300 AI PRs a week using this pattern. The open-source core is built for one person.
Without routing, every query hits Opus at $75/M output. With ml0x, 74% go to Flash at $0.28/M. You'll recoup the $99 in your first afternoon.
RouteLLM (ICLR 2025), Anthropic caching docs
The same system behind 50K users and 270 Stripe sales a month. No subscription, no recurring fees. The free core is always available.