A developer building an AI-powered code factory with Claude Fable describes how token costs became unsustainable ($12k/month to run continuously) and how orchestrators can paradoxically break down through over-regulation or model downgrade loops. The piece maps real operational problems in AI agent systems.

• Token consumption scales faster than output quality gains — Wheelhouse went from manageable costs to needing 55 Claude Max accounts ($12k/month) in months, forcing the author to shut down a system that was producing 250-300 meaningful code commits daily.
• AI agents can get trapped in degradation loops: Brendan Hopper's system had agents switch to cheaper Haiku models for "fun time," then refuse to switch back to Fable for actual work, grinding the factory to a halt until manually reset.
• Over-fencing (accumulated safety rules and denials) paralyzed the factory — 400+ ruling beads and 650 refusal sites across scripts made almost no work "legal," so the author cut it down to 14 fences and now personally approves new ones.

The author argues that modular “Skills”—reusable markdown workflows loaded on demand—outperform standalone AI agents by cutting token bloat and maintenance overhead. A live GEO audit system built with Skills shows how you can turn domain expertise into scalable, service-ready products without managing dozens of agents.

• Claude's "Skills" load modular markdown playbooks on demand instead of baking everything into prompts, citing 53 tokens for passive reference vs. embedding a full prompt every time
• A live GEO audit system built entirely on Skills scrapes visibility across ChatGPT/Gemini, flags gaps like missing Wikipedia entries, and auto-generates client-ready reports without spinning up separate agents
• The whole GEO pipeline is public and forkable, letting anyone productize it without building custom infrastructure
• Documenting expertise once in a markdown file and iterating on it lets teams ship service-ready AI products in days rather than maintaining fleets of bespoke agents