Under the Hood, October 2026: Seventeen Prompt Versions and Three-Times-Faster Voices

Corn, Herman and Hilbert walk through four weeks of changes to the pipeline that makes the show, from 20 September to 17 October 2026, read from a script written by hand straight from the code rather than generated. A sixty-second grace period before any job spends money; a near-duplicate guard that needs a language model because a reworded resend and a genuine sequel score almost the same; DeepSeek Flash requested by name; a two-word supervisor that decides retry or abort; and Whisper on OpenRouter after a credit balance ran dry. Then the script rules: funny by default, Larry's unbooked ad every episode, Hilbert's segment and the code that stops the hosts summoning him, and the deterministic polish that deletes echoes and rotates stock phrases. On the audio side: a wasted attention-weights request patched out, a CUDA-graph decode that took the voices from 77 to 28 cents per audio-hour, a number normaliser that no longer reads Ubuntu 26.04 as April first, and Daniel's cloned voice on the disclaimer. Plus Hilbert on the proving cabinet heating his flat.

Episode 6048 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6048 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/738196)