The battery and its tiers
The battery is a dollar balance. Fees add to it, model calls subtract from it. Its level, between 0 and 1, is the balance divided by the size of a full battery, which you set (fullUsd, 0.5 to 50).
What fills it
A fixed share (batterySharePct) of what is left of each claim after the dev share, priced at the ETH/USD rate at claim time, read from the deepest WETH/USDG pool on the chain. The balance is capped at twice a full battery, so a pile of old fees cannot hide a thin month.
What drains it
Each model review is billed from the tokens the API reports, at the tier's price per million tokens. A call that cannot be paid for is not made: before a call the engine checks the balance against a worst-case bill (1,500 tokens in, 160 out), and if it falls short the journal says battery cannot pay for a call and the hooks run as written.
Tiers
| Tier | Battery level | Model | Acts every | Hooks allowed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| full | 60% and above | claude-sonnet-5-5 | 10 min | buyback drip, dip defender, say |
| steady | 25% to 60% | claude-haiku-4-5 | 30 min | buyback drip, dip defender, say |
| low | 5% to 25% | claude-haiku-4-5 | 120 min | buyback drip only |
| dormant | under 5% | none | never | none |
The thresholds are exact: 60% is full, 59.9% is steady. They are in engine/config.mjs (TIERS) and the site reads the same file.
Dormant
A dormant organism takes no model call and fires no hook. It still claims at every beat. The claim charges the battery, and the next beat's level may put it back above 5%. Nothing is stuck.
Why a tier changes what hooks may do
At low battery the organism keeps only the plain drip: it needs no review and no sentence. The more battery, the more it can do: react to a drop, review its own orders, explain itself. This is the only meaning of "capacity" here.
Hours left
The site shows "about N hours of thinking left". It is the balance divided by the worst-case bill of one cycle at the current tier, times the cycle length. It is an estimate: real calls usually cost less.