How I stopped burning money on AI and attention at the same time (9 rules for solo builders)

If you’re a solo builder shipping with Claude/Codex/Cursor, you already know this trap: your AI bill climbs quietly your focus drops loudly you end each day feeling "busy" but not finished I kept treating these as two separate problems. They were actually the same loop: low-friction context switching. Here are the 9 rules that finally worked for me. 1) Track cost per build session, not per month Monthly totals are too late. I only changed behavior when I could see cost while I was working. 2) Give every prompt a budget before you send it If a task is worth $0.20, don’t let it become a $6 rabbit hole. 3) Split "explore" prompts from "execute" prompts Exploration is expensive by nature. Execution should be boring and predictable. 4) Keep one cheap model as your default lane I reserve expensive models for gnarly architecture or debugging dead-ends. Everything else stays cheap. 5) Block feed-level distractions during build windows Not full app blocks. Feed-level blocks. I still need tools/