Here I am back again with brand-new acquired knowledge. Back in 2021 we were building smart contracts with a team. I knew how important and critical it was. One small error and you have to redeploy the contract, which might cost anywhere from $200 to $2000 in ETH. Crazy times! Plus, security and smart contracts were fairly new, so lots of security holes were being discovered, meaning funds were never fully safe, and one day you might wake up and see that your contract has done something funky and gave away everything to a bad actor.

Some of it still true today.

But recently, things are changing. I was able to vibe code with Claude two versions of a simple NFT minting contract, which are, of course, dime a dozen in 2025, as compared to 2021, when it was harder to come by.

Deploying on Base is also significantly cheaper. Instead of $200 on ETH in the good old days, I spent about $1 each time. I was able to improve on the contract, as initially Claude made me a version that my contract pays for, and uses IPFS for storage. I realized that it means I'll have to maintain this forever, and it creates complicated debt that I wasn't willing to bear. Pinata, which I used for IPFS, had a severe file limitation so in less than a day with the current speed I'd be required to pay up $10/mo, potentially forever, for files in a fun side project that were just 400 bytes each.

So instead, Claude cooked a version 2 for me with improved requirements — this time, storage is not done with IPFS but directly onchain, and instead of the contract paying for minting (which was around $0.003 per mint but still require at least random checks once a month to see the balance and reload it as necessary), every user can now pay themselves.

However, I was dealing with SVG so closely for the first time, and so my PNG-to-SVG conversion meant that first NFTs were costing users $0.12, significantly more than before. It took all my prompting and available credits to redo the SVG design, and focus on minimizing everything that was extra. We done several rounds, reducing, reducing and reducing again to make SVG as compact as possible, even reducing extra spacing and such.

The new design, focused on minimalism, actually improved. Instead of decorative elements it's clear and purposeful. I think it turned out to be very nice indeed.

The result was an 84% reduction in code. The cost of each mint fell accordingly, from 12 cents to an average of 2 cents, a nice corresponding 84% cost reduction.

The system was ready, tested, and now producing live