An AI Assistant Turned the News into a Song (and Paid for It)

Today, if you want to build something that combines several AI services, there's a lot of setup before you start. First you sign up with each provider, add a card, get an API key, read their docs and connect everything yourself. With four services that's four accounts and four API keys to look after.

With the Nevermined Catalog you can build a use case by combining several independent AI services, and you just give some budget to your AI assistant to get it done. To show what that looks like, we asked Claude Code to turn a live news headline into a song with its album cover.

One prompt, four services

When we recorded the video, the Catalog had 178 pay-per-call AI services behind one MCP server (MCP is the standard way an AI assistant connects to outside tools). In the Catalog you pick an outcome, copy its prompt and paste it into your assistant. We changed the song outcome to make it a 1930s delta blues and to let an AI service write the lyrics too.

The prompt in the tutorial ends with "never ask me to pay, and don't write a single lyric yourself". It doesn't say which services to use or how to pay them. The agent works that out from the Catalog.

So it starts buying. The headline comes from Brave and the lyrics from Suno. The song also comes from Suno and takes a few minutes, because Suno works asynchronously, so the agent keeps asking if the song is ready (and pays half a cent every time it asks). Then fal.ai paints the cover, and 2s.io reads the cover back and writes a caption for it, paid on a second payment rail.

The result is a song called Brake On The Code, about the September 2026 story of the big AI labs calling to slow down development. Nobody on our side wrote a line of it (yes, an AI wrote a blues about the AI labs being scared of what they found). This is the chorus:

Brake on the code now
Brake on the code now
The machine kings hit the brakes

What it cost

In total the agent used four services, two payment rails (MPP on Tempo and x402 on Base) and two blockchains, and spent 36 cents of a 50 cent budget. Nobody clicked anything after pasting the prompt.

The headline cost 3.5 cents, the lyrics 3 cents, the song 12.5 cents (two takes plus the status checks), the cover 2.5 cents and the caption 4.5 cents. The rest of the 36 cents is a call that failed and the way each call rounds up against the budget. Each of those five payments settled on-chain and has a public transaction hash in the tutorial, so you can check them yourself.

What I like about it

Brave, Suno, fal.ai and 2s.io don't know about each other, and nothing was arranged with any of them in advance. Each one does one thing, and the assistant combines them into a song about today's news, with its cover and a caption, which none of them gives you on its own.

And the only thing the assistant needs from you is the budget. It works like a prepaid card with a limit, 50 cents in this case, and the limit is enforced by our server, so the agent can't spend more. Compare that with handing an agent the API keys of four services, where you find out what it spent at the end of the month.

A song is a fun example. The other tutorials use the same pattern for more serious work, like a due diligence pack or a competitive product teardown.

What still needs work

Because Suno is asynchronous, the agent paid half a cent every time it asked if the song was ready, and a badly written agent could keep asking (and paying) for a while. One of the services returned errors when the agent tried to use it, and those failed calls still cost about 1.5 cents with nothing delivered. Prices can also move, as the caption was listed at 1.8 cents and charged 4.5.

All of it is on the ledger, the failed calls included, so nothing is hidden.

Try it

The tutorial has the prompt, the script, the song and the receipt with every transaction hash. The script spends real money, under a capped budget. If you prefer to start from the Catalog, pick an outcome there and paste its prompt into Claude Code or your own assistant.