tegwick
b79ea9690d
Scope cut first, on the maintainer's decision after a spend review: the project is 38% product / 62% loop-meta, cost per response is 2.9x worse than its best window, and INTENT stage 0 still lacks a CLI player and bots. CB-WP-0005 and CB-WP-0006 cost ~$74 — 31% of all spend — for zero measured efficiency gain. T02 and T04 are cancelled unstarted. T01: SH-1/SH-2/SH-3 now report over the window since the last commit, and the cumulative figure is retained but labelled "history, NOT the metric". The prediction held decisively — window 655,744 mean context against cumulative 255,307, a 2.6x gap against a 20% refutation threshold. A cumulative mean over 1,094 responses cannot detect a worsening trend because the history outvotes the present. T03: `make shape-budget`, modelled on CB-01/CB-02. Soft thresholds are the existing SessionShape targets; hard is 1.5x, set before the next measurement per §Step 4. Deliberately not in `make all` — failing the build on context would block committing, and committing is what closes the attribution window and is the natural point to compact, so a gate that blocks the remedy is a trap. It fires HARD on its first run: 656,574 against a 300,000 ceiling. InnerLoop v1.5 establishes the soft 25% meta budget. Workplans declare kind: product|meta|mixed and `make status` reports the share; mixed splits 50/50 and says so. Soft on purpose — a task already started may be finished, because stopping mid-task to satisfy a ratio wastes the work. What it forbids is opening new meta work above the line. A pass that exceeds it must say so in its evidence and name the product work displaced. First reading: 68% OVER, of $74.22 attributed. Product reads $0.00 because the only product workplan, CB-WP-0001, predates qualified task ids and its bare T## labels collide across passes — stated in the output rather than papered over. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
222 lines
8.7 KiB
Markdown
222 lines
8.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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id: CB-WP-0002
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kind: meta
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title: "Make agentic cost measurable, so D2 claims are falsifiable"
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status: done
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state_hub_workstream_id: "b7c22f69-fbe9-48df-9619-007db79ae338"
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---
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# Purpose
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CB-WP-0001 specified a cost metric (AM-12, `M-D2-CST`) in full — price
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sheet, formula, staleness rule — and then could not report a number,
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because nothing was ever instrumented. It was recorded as
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"uncomputable".
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That was wrong, and the retrospective for this workplan should say so
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plainly: **the data existed the whole time.** Every Claude Code session
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transcript (`~/.claude/projects/<slug>/<session>.jsonl`) carries exact
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per-message `usage`, including the cache breakdown. Reading it for
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CB-WP-0001's session gives:
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> **Corrected 2026-07-31 by T01.** This section originally reported
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> **$248.46** from 131,863,164 cache-read tokens priced at Fable 5. That
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> figure was wrong by ~2.7×, for two independent reasons found in
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> `research/CB-RES-0002-cost-accounting.md` §Correction: one API response
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> is written to the transcript as up to six JSONL lines that each repeat
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> the *same* `usage` object (657 lines, 346 real responses), and the
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> session ran three models, not one. The numbers below are the re-derived
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> ones. The workplan's premise is unaffected; its arithmetic was not.
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Deduplicated by `requestId` and priced per message at its own model's
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rate. **Pinned** to messages at or before `2026-07-31T02:17:59Z` (commit
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`fc76445`, the end of CB-WP-0001) — the transcript is a live file that
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grows as later sessions append to it, so an unpinned total is not a
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repeatable acceptance target:
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| Component | Tokens | Cost |
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|---|---|---|
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| Output | 313,900 | $10.66 |
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| Cache read | 80,453,702 | **$59.59** |
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| Cache write (1h) | 1,672,854 | $21.95 |
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| Input | 676 | $0.00 |
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| Main transcript (339 responses: 213 opus-5, 118 fable-5, 14 sonnet-5) | | $92.21 |
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| Subagent tree (adversarial review, ran inside the pin) | | $1.11 |
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| **TRUE TOTAL** | | **$93.32** |
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The headline finding survives the correction and gets sharper:
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**88.4% of the cost is cache, against 314k tokens of output — a 256:1
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ratio of context re-read to text written.** Cost in an agentic loop is
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driven by context size × turn count, not by how much the model writes. No
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D2 decision made on "tokens per task" would have surfaced that.
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The correction is itself the lesson: this workplan opened with a
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mismeasured cost. Neither error was of the harness-does-nothing class the
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positive-control rule was written for — both sums ran over real data.
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What caught them was re-deriving the number instead of quoting it.
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This workplan makes cost a first-class measured dimension so that
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future AM-12 equivalents support conclusions instead of decorating an
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evidence file. It follows InnerLoop v1.0, including the rules that pass
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earned: every metric names its instrument, and every harness carries a
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positive control.
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## Phase A — Instrument
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## Task: Survey the available cost instruments
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T01
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status: done
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priority: high
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state_hub_task_id: "2694c2c1-0070-4d8e-b4fc-196b582b36d5"
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```
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Produce `research/CB-RES-0002-cost-accounting.md` per the InnerLoop
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survey template. Candidates at minimum: session transcript JSONL
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(`usage` per assistant message), the Custodian State Hub token-event
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API (`record_token_event`, `update_task_status` token tiers,
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`get_token_summary`), the Claude Code status bar, and the Anthropic
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usage/billing API. Per candidate: what it reports, granularity,
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accuracy, whether it survives compaction, and whether it can attribute
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cost to a unit of work.
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Note explicitly which are **exact** and which are **estimates** — the
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prior failure was tolerating an estimate-shaped metric. Name the
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benchmark-to-beat per dimension; expect the transcript to lead on
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accuracy and the hub to lead on durability.
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## Task: Decide the instrument and the attribution model (ADR)
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T02
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status: done
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priority: high
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state_hub_task_id: "eae248ab-f29f-4f11-9d20-e8145b0d822d"
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```
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Adversarial review of T01 first (InnerLoop §Step 2), committed as
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`history/YYMMDD-cost-accounting-{challenge,response}.md`.
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Then `decisions/ADR-0003-cost-accounting.md`. The genuinely hard part is
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**attribution**: a transcript is a flat message stream, and a "task" is
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a workplan concept. Options to weigh, not assume:
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- git commit timestamps as task boundaries (the loop commits per
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iteration, so boundaries already exist and are durable)
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- explicit session markers emitted at task start/end
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- hub task status transitions as the time index
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State the expected advantage per dimension and the known failure modes
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of the chosen model — in particular, what happens to attribution across
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`/compact`, across resumed sessions, and for work spanning a boundary.
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Gate: no collector code before this ADR is committed.
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## Task: Specify the cost metrics with named instruments
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T03
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status: done
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priority: high
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state_hub_task_id: "00d42ed2-4391-4580-aae2-06e3e151c69b"
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```
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Write `specs/CostAccounting.md`: the cost model (input, output, cache
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read, cache write at 5m and 1h, per the price sheet), the attribution
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contract, and the acceptance metrics — each naming the **command that
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produces its number**, per InnerLoop v1.0 §Step 4.
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Must include a metric for the finding that motivated this workplan:
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**cost composition** (what fraction is cache read vs write vs output),
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not only a total. A single total would have hidden the 53%.
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Revise `specs/MetricsAndScenarios.md` §1a to point at this spec, and
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replace AM-12's definition with one that is computable.
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## Phase B — Build and prove
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## Task: Implement the cost collector
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T04
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status: done
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priority: medium
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state_hub_task_id: "9eb8329b-5f41-477b-8cf3-2cda5ba8dbe8"
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```
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Implement the tool chosen in T02 (expected: `tools/cb-cost`). It reads
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transcripts, applies the price sheet at
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`benchmarks/baselines/model-prices.toml`, attributes cost per the T02
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model, and emits both a per-task table and a composition breakdown in
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the evidence-row format from T03.
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**Positive control is mandatory** (InnerLoop v1.0 §Step 5): the tool
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asserts that attributed tokens sum to the transcript total, and refuses
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to emit numbers when they do not reconcile. An unattributed remainder is
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reported as its own line, never silently dropped — the failure this
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whole workplan exists to prevent was a number that looked fine.
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Handle multi-model sessions: a session that switches models must price
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each message at its own model's rate.
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## Task: Validate against CB-WP-0001 and answer a real question
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T05
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status: done
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priority: medium
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state_hub_task_id: "bea4cc0a-e4d0-4077-9dc7-df7726a48f86"
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```
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Run the collector over the CB-WP-0001 session and commit
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`evidence/CB-EV-0002-cost-accounting.md`. The acceptance test is
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`specs/CostAccounting.md` AC-1: reproduce **$93.32 pinned at `fc76445`,
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as its two components** ($92.21 main transcript + $1.11 subagent tree),
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plus AC-2's zero reconciliation residual.
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*(Originally written as "must reproduce $248.46". That figure was wrong
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by 2.7×, and the first corrected target — $92.21 — was itself reachable
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only by a collector carrying the subagent blind spot the survey had just
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documented. Both errors are recorded rather than quietly overwritten;
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the sequence is the point.)*
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Then use it to answer at least one question that could not be answered
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before, and record the answer. Candidates: which of T01–T09 cost most
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and whether that matched its value; what a `/compact` costs; whether the
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adversarial review paid for itself; how much the six T08 code iterations
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cost relative to the research phase.
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A tool that produces numbers nobody draws a conclusion from has not
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cleared the bar that CB-WP-0001's AM-12 failed to clear.
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## Task: Wire cost into the loop
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T06
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status: done
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priority: low
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state_hub_task_id: "1412263b-70c1-43e4-957d-1ad6c3203ca9"
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```
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Make cost collection automatic rather than remembered: add the
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collector to the evidence checklist in `specs/InnerLoop.md`, emit hub
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token events so the Token Cost dashboard reflects real numbers rather
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than the 1000/500 heuristic fallback, and add a `make cost` target to
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the one command surface.
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## Task: Retrospective
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```task
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id: CB-WP-0002-T07
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status: done
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priority: low
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state_hub_task_id: "ebe58d91-be5f-4d5b-ba40-b03275b4eefc"
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```
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Revise `specs/InnerLoop.md` and `specs/MetricsAndScenarios.md` from what
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this pass teaches about metric design. The specific question to answer:
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CB-WP-0001 produced a fully specified metric that could not be computed,
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and v1.0's "every metric names its instrument" rule was written to stop
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that. Did it? If a metric can still be written without a working
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instrument, the rule needs teeth — for example, requiring that the
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instrument be demonstrated on real data before the metric is accepted.
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