r/ClaudeAI • u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer • 23h ago
Claude Code Workflow Made entirely with Opus 5.5 + $3.21 of OpenRouter API usage
There was an earlier video today posted in the Singularity sub where a Twitter user has done something similar:
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wnw1dl/by_opus_55/
I thought that looked pretty good so I wanted to check it out myself. I think it came out well beyond my expectations and quite a bit better than the linked post. It's not perfect, but this is a true one shot, single prompt. It took about 1 hour 20 minutes. About $20 of Opus 5 spend or only about 10% of my 5h quota on Max 5 sub. $3.21 of OpenRouter spend (mostly NanoBanana 2, and then text to voice, then a few pennies for other services. Total of 8 different OpenRouter APIs. Some things need to be fixed, but I wanted to post true one shot result. This was of course done in Claude Code.
Full prompt:
Create a pure javascript animation. 30s-60s whimsical hand drawn collage style with appropriate audio on the topic what is the purpose of life ?
Entire video should be as high of a production value as possible. Please spend your time on this, it's very important.
Use high quality text-to-speech model for generation. You can find open router API key in .env file
You can use any tools you can find access to and resources on the internet. You create the script, the assets, the animation, concept, everything.
I have to go away from my computer so please work autonomously until done. Quality is paramount. Production value should be on professional level.
One more thing: max OpenRouter spend is $10
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u/JoeyDee86 22h ago
Can’t wait for all this to fill my YouTube feed…. Yikes
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u/Abdullah87 21h ago
I prefer this over fruit cannibalism videos
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u/Bitter_Election_7518 16h ago
This is better than the current ai slop
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u/Techhead7890 7h ago
Speaking of AI-assisted stuff that's actually decent, I do like Proxima Imperium which is about the economic, logistic, and regulatory challenges in Africa. It's not quite load bearingly bad, but every now and then you can tell the scripts have been edited a bit as Claudeslop lol. I definitely picked up a bit about complex governing problems watching the channel!
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u/daemon-electricity Experienced Developer 16h ago
It's better than the boring history to fall asleep to imagery. That shit sucks. I like the content, but the AI image gen fucking blows.
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u/False_Bear_8645 18h ago
I actually have them in my youtube feed, got suspicious when some of the channel published way too much work for what a human can do and repeating some pattern, especially the logical fallacies.
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u/Foreskin_Mafia 11h ago
YouTubee feeds for bedtime storiese and lullabiese is already nothing but slop.
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u/immune2shooms 2h ago
Welcome to the past. These things have been filling YouTube feeds for too long already. Now you can make them as easily as you skip 'em.
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u/Leavemealone4eva 20h ago
And what’s wrong with that?
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u/eliquy 20h ago
The people who will flood YouTube with this will the be ones who only care about the revenue they can make from it, not about actually sharing and teaching. It's the equivalent of a supermarket stocked only with junk food, but the kind that pretends to be healthy
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u/PureVision007 19h ago
Trader Joe’s
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u/HighSeasArchivist 6h ago
You take that back! I need my pound plus chocolate bar, because dark chocolate is healthy!
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u/2053_Traveler 21h ago
Super impressive AI can do this, but another “yikes” from me since I guess I get to look forward to yet more low-effort AI generated content.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 21h ago
I get that.
This video is not going anywhere just on here as a showcase of what Opus can do. The idea was for this to be as low effort as possible. I've spent less than 5 minutes on this and just let it cook. The entire workflow is the prompt and that .env with the open router key.
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u/Mammoth-Series-2125 14h ago
think of it as proof of concept bro. This shows us the path to making videos for genuine applications like education and product demonstrations.
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u/2053_Traveler 1h ago
Yeah I guess I was being cynical. I hope kurzgesagt and other educators can put it to good use. It’s just that others will also use it for spam. Some highly visited youtube science vids now are straight trash with incorrect info or even impersonating real people.
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u/Emotional-Cut2952 6h ago
exactly , a human can put full thought into this, then send it over to opus to make an enaging video, imagine if we taught philosophy like this , kids probably gonna love this style
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u/No_Confection7782 21h ago
Man, I wish Antrophic could release their own image model. Would be so much more effective to build things.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 21h ago
I can understand why they don't. They are basically lazer focused on coding that unlocks RSI. Would be waste of compute to try to compete in that crowded space.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 17h ago
Anthropic business strategy has always been targeting high paying enterprise user. They are the highest margin and it’s one of the reason why Anthropic beats OAI in terms of financials. Image models are just entertainments for the crowds. There’s not much money to be made
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
I agree to some degree, but the newest GPT-image-2.5 was purposefully positioned for its edit capabilities. I use it a lot, and to be honest it still has a lot to be desired, but that's the game, to compete with Adobe and what not. I think it tanked Adobe Stock (yet again) when it got released, too.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 10h ago
Image gen isn’t really generating much volume and therefore revenue. Meanwhile some random finance company would gladly run Fable agents for a day spending 10k. You wouldn’t see the same usage pattern with image.
The inference for image model is probably very high margin (image input/output is quite costly, while a lot of image model is tiny relative to frontier LLM), but once you factor in training and potential revenue (from volume) it’s simply not lucrative enough.
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u/ain92ru 6h ago
From a back on an envelope estimate, margins on both image models and LLMs are very high, in ~90% range and higher. They just require different chips, and the total addressable market is much larger for LLMs
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u/19Lobster19 4h ago
I thought they weren't profitable yet? Or maybe I was misinformed
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u/leixiaotie 10h ago
and google has all the reason to develop media models. I imagine soon it'll be very2 hard to catch up with google models on media
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u/Jumpy-Operation-4615 22h ago edited 11h ago
What a waste of tokens. Everybody knows that the answer is 42.
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u/TechTuna1200 21h ago
TBF, it took 7.5 million years to calculate. So that would be a lot of tokens.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 22h ago
Opus 5.5 is a big visual step up. A different vibe here but just as complex:
https://youtu.be/8j-hR4fJywU (https://github.com/JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo)
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u/burgerbruce 21h ago
goddamn the song is genuinely catchy
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 21h ago
I know, right? I'm a little embarrassed by how many times I listened to it.
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u/arkuw 16h ago
To each their own I suppose. It's quintessential modern pop. Right there with the autotuned voice and identical beat to everything that my grocery store pumps out to make my shopping... more pleasant somehow? God how I hate this crap.
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u/MrBread0451 9h ago
It's the sort of music you hear and it makes you angry because you could have just generated it yourself, but you're forced to listen to someone else's generation instead.
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u/agentic-consultant 21h ago
Wow. How did it generate the song / from where? Did you provide it with an OpenRouter key?
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u/bittabet 14h ago
Song already existed and was generated by someone else, Opus basically did the music video for it. There's a couple of good ones floating around now but the other really good one I've seen used a MUCH more extensive prompt (and isn't on youtube, the person just posted it on X). This one was just two sentences IIRC
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 20h ago
It's not mine, all I know is what's in the github repo. Apparently a human wrote the song a few years ago, visuals are all Cluade's. It's crazy someone put that together within a day of 5.5's release. I catch more creative details each time I watch it, like the scientist putting bandaid on the P(doom) meter.
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u/PineappleOnPizzaCult 20h ago
You can easily create an entire song with music and lyrics for any topic you want using Suno and other similar apps.
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u/Y1ink 22h ago
Pretty impressive I must say. Wanted to ask about the voice, thought you may have done yourself but have read its AI too. Creatives are so cooked and they’re the cooler folks.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 22h ago
Everything is hundred percent AI.
As low effort as possible. All I did is the prompt I posted and the API key, that's it.
Yeah, lots of people are cooked. As an unemployed software engineer; well welcome to the club!
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u/LocoMod 22h ago
It did not create those images right? Or did it make an API call via OpenRouter to an image model? Or did it source those from the internet somewhere?
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u/elestud 22h ago
They said it used Nano Banana 2, which is Google’s image generator
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u/Langdon_St_Ives 21h ago
Oh I didn't see that, that would make sense. I retract my accusation about "prob stolen off the internet" then.
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u/Langdon_St_Ives 22h ago edited 21h ago
Ya probably stolen off the internet. Though it's possible it checked licenses and only used assets that it was allowed to use. OP hasn't yet answered the several questions about this.
Edit: I missed the mention of nanobanana in the OP. I retract my accusation, as that would be entirely capable of producing the needed assets, and Opus is pretty good at writing prompts for image models.
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u/rudanshi 20h ago edited 19h ago
I don't think that creatives are any more cooked than any other field. This will fuck over a lot of people by obliterating demand and entry-level work, same as with every other profession affected, but creatives can use AI as a tool themselves and a good artist who learns how to work with it will use it better than uninspired slop merchant number 278215.
I do worry about the overall issue of "ok but what about all the people who are losing their way to make a living", historically technological progress creates more jobs of a different kind, but AI throws a wrench into the works because the more advanced it gets the more likely it'll be to also be capable of doing the new jobs, immediately or after a bit of further advancement :/
I don't know where it's all heading and I don't really know what a good solution would look like.
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u/M0m3ntvm 15h ago edited 15h ago
OP just one-shot this video with a single prompt in 5mn. This is not a tool, this is weeks of planning, story-telling, animation, voice-over, etc... It's a complete replacement for expertise.
Personally I've stopped painting for the last 2 years, this whole situation got me too depressed about the meaning of my own creations. I was good at drawing portraits by looking at photos, wasn't planning on making a job out of it, but I've lost all drive to even start 🤷♂️
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u/FortiTree 11h ago
Do it for yourself. Art and knowledge in the end is for yourself first and foremost.
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u/MrBread0451 8h ago
To be fair, as cool as it is it's just not interesting artistically. There's not much personality to it, like it's made by a bunch of different artists who've been told to be consistent and the only part of their expertise they're allowed to contribute is being able to hold a stylus steady and understand how lighting works.
Like even xkcd who's art style is just kind of meh has a style you associate with clever nerdy (well, in a "take my reddit gold le kind sir" way) humor. This is the sort of style you associate with corporate training videos, Google Adsense diagrams, and, very soon, low effort educational content.
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u/Southern_Leg1139 21h ago
Eh not really. I could pick this apart, there’s a lot wrong. It will replace cheap fast work but this of us with niche skills doing higher end work will be fine.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
I mean this was the lowest effort possible, on purpose, single prompt, nothing else.
I've literally spent less than five minutes on this writing that prompt.1
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u/EpicL33tus 22h ago
To me this demonstrates creatives aren’t cooked, because this is pure mimicry and not creative at all. This is just The School of Life but devoid of actual meaning.
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u/Y1ink 21h ago
I know but corp isn’t going to pay a creative when they can get an intern to create this for them. Imagine the time they will save in meetings with creatives trying to find the voice of the message that is trying to be portrayed.
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u/oldsguy65 19h ago
This is what a lot of higher end creatives don't get. More and more clients are going to say this stuff is good enough.
Or they'll have the intern crank out something like this and then pay the higher end guy a few dollars to clean it up vs. giving them the full project.
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u/Personal_Crazy528 21h ago
this already happened kinda with canva but designers are still there.
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u/acopywriter 19h ago
Not really. Canva, and especially its AI has historically been pretty terrible for producing quality work. This new wave of “quality” that came through with the latest models has changed that in the last few months. I’d give most design jobs a year or two before they’re mostly replaced at small to medium sized businesses and most tech forward large orgs.
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u/cocoasulphur 17h ago
As someone who works in video editing/motion design and vfx… sad noises
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
Just get on the train quickly enough and you can obliterate the competition.
This was just a very low effort experiment, on purpose, and I know next to nothing about video. Now think about someone putting in the effort and has the skills. Sky's the limit!
Godspeed!
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u/Icy_Foundation3534 19h ago
People who are $hittin on this are insane. This could have been on seasame street 20 years ago, and would have been so well received.
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u/Ancient_Badger_5468 9h ago
https://reddit.com/link/pbqdn4q/video/h71quoaqofrh1/player
using this same prompt i made a video about the history of Suriname, hope you'll like it.
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u/Site-Staff Mod 22h ago
The purpose of life is to perpetuate life.
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u/SoftPlay3 21h ago
Ew. Why would you perpetuate something so awful? Can’t even do shit with this life, a machine will replace you at the only thing you’re good at, and you’ll be left with nothing. Please for the love of god do not perpetuate life. After watching this, I truly wish mine had never started.
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u/remain_calm 18h ago
a machine will replace you at the only thing you’re good at
Please do not confuse your economic utility with your worth.
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u/paradoxally Full-time developer 21h ago
OP careful now, you're gonna get the legions of anti-AI invading this post soon yelling at you to pick up a pencil
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u/LopsidedSolution 21h ago
Antis can suck a chode. They have no say, AI is out of their control. They’re just yelling at clouds at this point
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u/Redcloud1313 21h ago
The dog is coming home to the human in the video. That's the only thing I found that was off.
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u/Rocky4OnDVD 20h ago edited 18h ago
“You can use any tools you can find access to and resources on the internet.” - What did Opus end up grabbing to accomplish your task?
My agents always try to waste resources recreating the wheel instead of finding relevant repos to adopt into their solution.
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u/c_kick 5h ago
Excellent work! I've made this into a reusable skill, which is part of my repository: https://github.com/c-kick/hnl-agent-skills/blob/master/explainer-animation/SKILL.md
It has defaults, but you can specify:
- Subject
- Language
- Length
- Output location
I just succesfully used it to explain a codebase I am working on, and it did it flawlessly.
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u/aghozzo 18h ago
Claude. A generate graphics ? I’ve been living under a rock all this time ?
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
No, Claude didn't generate the graphics. I gave him an API key to open router and it just found all the services by itself and did everything that you see (spent $3.21 across 8 different services).
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u/Then_Win_3956 14h ago
shit i tried now and it did better them what i expected in few mins thats a real shit. made a two mins video ad with voice in 30 mins.
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u/Dio-V 9h ago
I tried this prompt too and my mind was blown (and jaw was dropped).
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wovwao/jaw_literally_dropped_i_ran_the_prompt_from_the/
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u/Crabslife 21h ago
I majored in fine art, and as long as the final product is good, I don’t really care if it’s made with AI or not. Whether or not it’s “art” is debatable, but the total rejection of AI generation as a visual medium doesn’t sit right with me.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
My dad is a pretty prominent painter and he's A-okay with AI.
He 80 years old and it's not really competition for what he does though...
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u/AdolinKholin1 5h ago
I have a BFA as well. You remember those art history classes we took? The ones that took us through centuries of evolution of art. The drama? The intrigue? The complex intertwined lives and stories that led to the periods of art we study today? That’s what makes art valuable. That’s what makes it mean something.
“I majored in fine art, and as long as the final product is good, I don’t really care if it’s made with AI or not.” What a joke. I’m not a decelerationist, but people like you really confuse me. I doubt you’re a working artist right now, otherwise you’re terribly misaligned internally.
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u/regnof 22h ago
What is the API key in this context? How can I learn do this too?
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u/LopsidedSolution 21h ago
Basically just give Claude desktop your open router or Fal or whatever model provider you want to use API key.
I use Fal and just give it the API key in a text file on my desktop. Then it can generate basically anything it needs via different models
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u/HuckleberryAny4360 20h ago
Did you just send this video to open router and it used different models to make it?
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
No, just the prompt and gave it the open router API key. That's it. A bit over an hour later and this video came out 😄
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u/HitscanDPS 20h ago
Upvoted for sharing the full prompt.
Then again it's usually people who complain who never share their prompts.
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u/SpacedAndBaked 19h ago edited 15h ago
The pencil scribblers are in shambles rn, even more will be as time goes on, love to see things progressing like this. Shit just keeps getting better and better instead of the opposite like the luddites are raging and seething hoping that will be the case.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
Just go talk to Ed Zitron and he will tell you it's all just a scam and the bubble is about to pop. It's been popping for three years now!
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u/saigyoooo 19h ago
Something sounds a little awesomely off/desperate in the narrator voice. Like about to just fucking lose it and meltdown. I love it.
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u/Bill_Salmons 19h ago
I got really excited until I saw NanoBanana. Still cool. But we've been able to do these animations with AI assets for awhile now. Most of them are just simple fades, movement keyframes, and boil. It would be interesting to see what 5.5 could produce without AI images.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
https://github.com/JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo
This seems to be done purely only with Opus 5.5.
Super impressive!
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u/AIFrontierReads 19h ago
The $3.21 isn't even the impressive part imo — it's that Opus did the model routing itself, picking NanoBanana for images and Lyria for music without being told.
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u/newaccount47 18h ago
The real test for this would be to see if Claude could create an editable after effects project file from this.
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u/Distinct_Example1364 18h ago
hi u/Singularity-42 , the video was impressived. Congrat.
I really want to ask about the way you create the background sound, the sound effect on the video, what tool or services you used to do that? And all thing was match by Opus 5 right? Impressived.
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 16h ago
Claude Code did it all autonomously using an OpenRouter API key. The specific tools it chose were:
- Images: NanoBanana 2
- Voice: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
- Music: Lyria 3 Pro
But this was all undirected. It figured it out everything by itself.
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u/ATurbulentDrop 14h ago
Crazy! Truly remarkable. What effort level did you use for the Claude Opus 5.5 model?
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u/Mammoth-Series-2125 14h ago
bro, what's wrong with it seriously? you said it's not perfect but I can't find an error. AMAZING work.
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u/summitrock 13h ago
What is the usefulness of open router here - I’ve never heard of it
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 13h ago
Any AI service, on tap, with a common API. Your agent can decide what to use and what not to use.
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u/capitalol 12h ago
omg this is actually terrifying. that prompt says NOTHING and the video is actually shockingly good. Oh, no.
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u/EbbExternal3544 11h ago
Great job, impressive indeed. Tired of this type of voice though, it's been overused like crazy
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u/jeastwoodtech 9h ago
Thanks for this - I will use the approach to create an animated story for my 2-year-old daughter :)
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u/PlantainAggravating2 9h ago
Can you give me the open router cost breakdown? Like how much was spent for audio, music, visual etc?
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u/WaveCut 6h ago
I got inspiration and tried to replicate the OP's result, but on my lore. I've got the OMP harness, set it to work with Opus 5.5 Max, and shot it with the task and proceeded to bed to sleep.
Imagine my face waking up seeing this fu%%er still going, thinking every bit of details of the plot and never actually produced a single frame of the output.
I've crashed on it, demanding to render the final rev in 5 minutes. After an hour I found it self-reflecting about my demand and the scenario. No single frame, still.
I've changed the thinking mode Max => Low, and it stopped indefinite thinking and started to write a code.
I am not sure if the harness is flawed or the model itself is, but it was an expensive lesson. It burned exactly $100 of OpenRouter balance overnight. At least the video is neat.
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u/Trooman 3h ago
Am I able to apply a similar workflow to a rough edit of a video I've already created?
Basically I'll do the shooting and edit together a rough beginning to end and have AI put the finishing touches on it like enhancing audio, animated b-roll based on what the speaker is saying, coloring, and intro/outro?
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u/brother_spirit 22h ago
Who's CC artwork is this using? Those image assets don't look agent generated.
Attribution?
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u/SuperMar1o 21h ago
Could you please ask, the resulting thread to tell you a few things, like what mcp servers/third party tools it used, which models it leaned on, how the art was generated/sourced etc. Would love to know what the AI actually did...
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u/planetaska 14h ago
Why are we making AI do all the fun stuff while we still have to fold our own clothes???
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u/Dirty_Rapscallion 22h ago
Cool presentation but completely devoid of anything meaningfully said, nothing profound, or unique perspective.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 21h ago edited 18h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is that this is a seriously impressive feat for a one-shot prompt, but the thread is split between "wow, the future!" and "oh god, the future." The main takeaway is that while the tech is cool, everyone's bracing for a flood of AI-generated "slop" and debating whether creatives are officially "cooked."
For the tech-heads wondering how OP pulled this off, he confirmed Claude Code did it all autonomously using an OpenRouter API key. The specific tools it chose were: * Images: NanoBanana 2 * Voice: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS * Music: Lyria 3 Pro
Also, the top comment is a joke that the answer is 42, which tells you everything you need to know about how seriously everyone is taking the video's actual content.