Study notes from a whole book chapter, for four cents

Here's a story for anyone reading assigned texts in high school or university and running out of time before the exam.

I gave an AI agent the first five chapters of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — about ten thousand words — and asked it to do two things: write me chapter summaries, and produce ten study-style Q&A pairs I could quiz myself on. Thirteen minutes later I had both files, ready to review.

Total cost: $0.042. Less than a nickel. Well under one-tenth of the price of a coffee.

Why this matters if you're a student

You probably don't have a paid ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription. And even if you do, running it against every long reading you get assigned adds up fast. But the tools you do have access to — free tiers, hobbyist AI editors like OpenCode or Aider — are all built on the same API standard. If you point them at Reality Router, the router picks the cheapest capable model for each task and hands the results back.

That means a homework workflow you thought only students with subscriptions could pull off — "read this chapter, give me a summary and study questions" — becomes something anyone can run for pennies. Even better: you can run it on your own laptop, your own file, your own reading. Nothing leaves your computer that you don't want to.

What actually came out

The chapter summaries hit the right beats: Alice bored on the riverbank, following the White Rabbit down the hole, the "DRINK ME" bottle and the "EAT ME" cake, growing huge in the Rabbit's house, meeting the Caterpillar on the mushroom. Not vague — the actual sequence of events, in order, per chapter.

The Q&A pairs used the actual text. Sample:

Q: What did the White Rabbit say to itself when Alice first saw it?
A: "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!"

Q: How did the Dodo decide the Caucus-race?
A: "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes."

Actual quotes from the actual book. Not the agent making things up. Which is what you need if you're studying for a test where the professor might ask about specific language.

What the router actually did

The router picked a model that could handle a long reading without wasting money on something more expensive. If the task had been harder, or trivially simpler, it would have picked differently. That's the whole point: you don't have to think about which model, you just get the notes.

Try it yourself

Reality Router is free and open source. Pair it with a free-tier API key from any provider, hook it up to OpenCode or Aider (both free), and you've got a study assistant that runs for pennies per assignment. No subscription needed.

→ realityrouter.dev

Study tip when your reading is long: in Reality Router's settings, push the cost/time slider all the way toward time. That tells the router "for this task I'd rather pay a couple extra cents to get accurate quotes and summaries" — instead of trying to save every fraction of a cent by using a smaller model that might miss details. For long readings, pinned-to-time is the setting you want.

Source used: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, chapters I–V, from Project Gutenberg (public domain).