After 10 years as an engineer, the thing I'd teach new vibe coders first: build tools with Claude Code that cost zero tokens to run

After 10 years in engineering, the core argument is that vibe coders default to LLM calls for problems better solved with deterministic code. Using Claude Code to generate conventional scripts, classifiers, or small neural networks means the AI handles the authoring cost once, while the resulting artifact runs free at inference time with predictable outputs.