A $3.21 animated short, from one prompt

Of everything here, this is the one to remember, and it is because of a number rather than a technique.

A finished animated short used to be measured in weeks and salaries. Here the entire cost is $3.21 and about eighty minutes, and that number includes the orchestration — Claude Code ran eight separate APIs on OpenRouter rather than doing the work itself.

That is the actual shape of the change. Not that one model got good at video, but that an agent can be trusted to coordinate several specialists, pick between them, and come back with something finished. The economic consequence is not a better demo; it is that the fixed cost of making a thing collapsed to near zero.