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How I built an agentic writing pipeline on Mastra: researcher, writer, editor, human approval, and the token-limiter bug that made revisions invent details.

Composer 2.5 and Grok 4.5 built the same PancakeBot frontend from the same prompt and skills. Composer finished faster, while Grok delivered the more polished first pass.

Colibrì, a ~1,300-line pure C inference engine with zero dependencies, runs the 744B-parameter GLM 5.2 MoE model on a laptop with 25 GB of RAM and no GPU by streaming int4-quantized experts from NVMe. Cold-cache throughput is 0.05 to 0.1 tokens per second, so speed is the honest limiter, but it is an existence proof that frontier-scale local inference works on commodity hardware.

Coding agents get better every month, and the way to stay in control is to give them clear instructions and context rather than fight the shift. This covers agent instruction file conventions worth adding to a repo (AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, CLAUDE.md, Cursor skills) and two open-source tools, Ponytail and Caveman, that cut token spend by trimming what agents write and compressing what you send.

Model choice is an engineering decision that shows up in both output quality and your bill. This walks through models.dev and artificialanalysis.ai as the two resources for shortlisting on specs/price and then checking capability, cost per task, and latency, with worked comparisons across GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5, Gemini, LongCat-2.0, and Seedance 2.0.