Everyone is telling you to go rent the new Mythos-class model at ten dollars in and fifty out per million tokens. You do not need it. The result you actually want, a system that ships boring work while you sleep and never lies to you about it, comes from the machine you build around the model, not from the model itself.
This is the field guide to that machine, built on Opus 4.8: half the price of the top tier, zero data retention, and for the one seat that matters, covered by the Claude Code subscription you already pay for. Ten builds, each with a checkpoint, about two hours of hands-on time.
What is inside
A CLAUDE.md the model cannot negotiate with. A daily loop where the top model makes every decision but writes almost no tokens, cheap models do the work, an independent verifier grades it, and a bash script holds the final vote. A trust ledger that grants and revokes autonomy per skill, automatically, based on measured pass rates. A goals directory where everything you finish keeps getting re-verified, so nothing rots silently. A learning law that turns every hard problem you solve into an atomized note the next run reads, so the system compounds reasoning and not just uptime. A budget that enforces itself. And a before-and-after test that proves your cheap workers actually behave before you let them run unattended.
The install prompt is included
You do not have to build it by hand. The guide ships with a single prompt you paste into Claude Code. It reads the spec, detects your stack, and scaffolds every file, pausing at each checkpoint so you can see it work before the next piece stacks on top. It is generalized to run on any repo with a test command.
Who it is for
Anyone with a repo, a terminal, and a Claude Code subscription. The examples are code-flavored because loops grew up around codebases, but the goal system and half the loops work on invoices, reports, and reading lists just as well. The predicates are just shell commands.
Drop your email and the full guide plus the install prompt land in your inbox.