Budget a picture at ~1,000 tokens, and cite Anthropic's own skill file when someone argues.

A tokenizer thread traced the phrasing in Google AI Studio's hedged "a picture is worth ~1,000 ~words" back to Anthropic's public claude-code repo, where the frontend-design SKILL.md literally instructs "a picture is worth 1000 tokens." That's a citable budgeting heuristic sitting in a shipped skill file, not folk wisdom. Text runs ~700 words per 1,000 tokens depending on tokenizer, so screenshots are roughly a page and a half of prose each. Ten of them in a session is real money.