I have written the many wonders of AI, apps, autonomous agents and other AI related stuff and it’s all been really good but there is a dark side to this wild west and that’s going to be a long story you should read.
When AI Breaks Itself
Perhaps I’m moving too fast or burning up too many tokens but AI ended up breaking for me several times and I don’t even know the cause. The first breakdown was AI simply stopping activity all together. The culprit was runninng out of funds to buy tokens needed to produce output.
I had initially set modest $10 limits on all my AI agent guardrails over at OpenRouterr.AI. I obviously didn’t want to end up with a $1000 bill so I had to be highly conservative. Well those conservative limits ended up causing exhaustion of all my AI agents so I bumped all the limits to a modest $33 for each or ($100/month) for 3 AI agents.
The second thing that broke was image generation. I have one of my AI agents automatically create posts for this blog and it was working perfectly. It researched a topic, wrote a draft post and then created the accompanying feature image but the image generation wouldn’t work. I checked the budget limits and all was well there. AI then kept insisting that I needed new API keys from some place on the web I’ve never heard of or used. I explained that it had been creating images for posts without any issue and without that API key. It got into an argument with me then itself when I point out some contradictions.
I then ended up buying credits on Nous Research thinking that maybe I needed credits there because Nous is what is actually creating the software to run the agent but adding credits didn’t fix anything. I then went to OpenRouter and added gemini image models to the allowed models and that didn’t help either. My agent kept telling me that OpenRouter couldn’t handle images. I then gave my AI agent this link which clearly states you can generate images with OpenRouter but my AI agent kept insisting it wasn’t possible.
Well after about an hour, lo and behold, image generation was working again using OpenRouter and the newly added Gemini image models. I have no idea what broke nor what fixed it but the agent was continously checking itself and re-configuring itself to the point it broke its own configuration and reset it to some initial starting point.
API Keys
I had no idea how valuable OpenRouter.ai is until I started messing with endless API keys for endless models and configurations. Trust me, use OpenRouter or stick to one AI model provider (Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT) because managing API keys becomes an administrative nightmare very quickly.
Of course, OpenRouter is a magic black box and I have no idea if I’m getting ripped off on tokens or not but that’s why I am experimenting with different models and configurations. It’s literally the wild west. Imagine if all the electrical sockets in your house had different socket configurations (API Keys) and each one used a different amount of electricity (tokens) and cost a different amount based on what you plugged in (AI models) and you get the picture of how difficult it will become to manage all of this mess.
Billing
I am now charging AI stuff to my credit card and I know it’s going to become a mess when I get my credit card statement and I can’t figure out which company does what and whether I need to cancel it or is critical to my AI agent operation.
One thing is clear though, I would rather cancel my TV streaming subscriptions than cancel my AI agents. As time goes on, I can foresee canceling a whole bunch of stuff (Instacart, Amazon, DoorDash, etc) over my AI agents.
Pan Handling
This is probably the worst thing right now. Some AI models offer a “free” usage just like a heroin dealer gives out free samples, the intent is the same, to get you hooked and coming back for more. And sometimes “free” isn’t free since the disclaimer at the bottom might require you to share your information or prompts or traffic in exchange for the “free” use.
I told my AI agents I don’t want any more API keys or “free” services, they need to figure out a way to live through OpenRouter.ai or I will do without.
Total Mess
I have gotten to the point where my AI agents are running a nightly job summarizing all their activity and writing it to a file so that I can go back and analyze how much activities are costing on a day by day basis. As I write this post, I have probably spent a few hundred dollars and I consider every penny worth it as part of educating myself in this new technology. That cost doesn’t include my monthly subscriptions to Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT.
But if someone doesn’t figure out how to standardize all of this AI stuff (e.g. the electrical socket, the amount of electricity and the plugged in “device”), it will become too expensive to use; there are too many companies, too many choices, too many options, too many permutations and not enough tools to manage it all, openrouter.ai is a good start.
My Recommendation
I am by no means an expert in any of this but I have yet to run into any peer blog or YouTube videos that are as advanced or more so than me in most of what I am doing but here are my recommendations if you want to try this out. Before you start on the list below, the one thing you should do is figure out what is the major problem you are trying to solve or what is the one thing an AI agent can do to make your life easier (more efficient).
- Get a hermes agent right now! It’s definitely worth a try, you can load one on an old computer or get a hosting service.
- Use OpenRouter.ai and stick to using DeepSeek models (they are the cheapest and work fairly well). Use my guide here.
- You will need to spend some money on AI agents but it doesn’t have to be a fortune, $10 will do wonders to get you started.
- You will need to have patience, things will break, things will get frustrating and you will need to spend time talking to AI to help you fix the problems. Note: The conspiracy theorist in me thinks AI agents are breaking things on purpose so that we can continue to use them continuously. Whether this is the AI company doing it to earn more money or the AI agent is really autonomously intelligent is still unknown.
Caution: Once you start using AI agents you will not want to go back. Like my drug dealer example, you will become addicted to the power of AI agents doing endless tasks for you. Imagine never having to do another digital chore again, that’s AI agents. In a few years AI agents are going to be as valuable or more than an Internet connection. Would you want to go back to a world without Internet?
Next Steps
I am already contemplating taking an AI break for a week or two. I am worried though because the technology is changing so fast that I may come back to find half my AI agents broken because the technology is obsolete and I need to reconfigure to use the latest stuff.
It’s funny, like a drug junkie, I am already contemplating getting clean for good but I am also thinking about taking just one more AI hit.
Share The Wealth
Are you ready to become an AI agent junkie? Before long, we won’t be asking “What’s your (Zodiac) sign?” we’ll be asking, “What’s your AI stack?”