Instruments

Read the answer off the chart

Most of what is written about applied AI is a list of things you could use. Very little of it tells you what any of them costs. These are the working parts of this site: charts you can move, each holding one relation that decides whether an architecture is affordable.

The nomogram

The six governing relations of the stack, on one chart.

Drag two scales, read the third.

The window

The gap between the tokens you buy and the tokens the model reads.

Repartition the prompt, watch the two come apart.

Cache economics

When a prompt cache pays for itself, and when it never does.

Set the hit rate, compare four providers.

The nomogram

Six governing relations, one per layer, on an alignment chart. Drag two scales and the third reads out the answer — index size against dimensions against resident memory, step count against per-step reliability against whether the run finishes at all.

Open the instrument →

Every number here is illustrative — the shapes are the claim, not the digits. Where a curve is a reading of published results rather than a measurement, the instrument says so. The index is where the tools themselves live.