A year ago a decent executor model cost real money per million tokens. Now there are three or four sitting in the near-free tier. On paper that's a collapse. In practice my spend is flat, and the reason is boring. A cheaper model gets re-run. It stops early, or it silently substitutes a literal path where a glob was supposed to go, or it burns most of its output budget thinking before it says anything, and the orchestrator sends it around again. Three cheap attempts at a step is not cheaper th...