D12What it costs the developer
Asking a model to write it is not free.
Seventy-four thousand lines is about three quarters of a million output tokens, before the first correction. You pay it again on the next project, and it writes something different.
What actually goes wrong
A model can produce the monorepo, the API, the admin panel and the auth. It produces them again on the next project, at the same cost, in a different shape, with different names and a different idea of where a rule belongs.
The variance is the expensive part, not the tokens. Two projects generated a month apart cannot share a fix, because they do not share a structure.
What Grit does about it
- The scaffolding is deterministic: the same description produces the same files, this month and next year.
- Tokens go on the feature rather than on the shape, because the shape is already there.
- The structure is documented and identical across projects, so a model working inside it has a convention to follow rather than one to invent.
The commands
The same output every time
grit new billinggrit generate resource Invoice --fields "number:string, total:money"
Give your AI tool the project’s own conventions
grit mcp
What it does not do
Determinism is about the shape, not about your domain. The rules that make the application yours are still written by somebody, and that somebody may well be a model.