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Building AtlasBurn

Building in the open: the engineering, math, and product decisions behind AtlasBurn's cost-intelligence engines.

• Content-blind by design — your cost tool should never see your prompts — To tell you what your AI costs, a tool needs token counts. It doesn't need your customers' conversations. Here's why we drew that line, and where it holds.
• Your AI cost tool shouldn't make you open a dashboard — We turned AtlasBurn into an MCP server. Now you ask your assistant "what's my AI runway?" and get an answer from your real data — without leaving the terminal.
• The zero-baseline principle — why AtlasBurn assumes nothing — Most dashboards fill the gaps in your data with defaults and hand you a confident number. We made the opposite choice, on purpose. A field note on building AtlasBurn.