The mind

The mind is one model call per cycle, made only when there are orders to review and the battery can pay for it.

What it receives

The orders (hook, amount, reason) and a small context: the price in ETH per token, the price change over the last hour, the treasury, what was burned today, the daily cap and the tier.

What it may answer

{"scale": 0.0 to 1.0, "say": "one sentence, under 160 characters"}

• scale is the share of each order to keep. 1 keeps it whole, 0 holds it back. The engine clamps it to the range: an answer of 7 becomes 1. It can never raise an order.
• say is the public line. It is cut at 200 characters.

The prompt tells it to trim only for a concrete reason visible in the data, for example a price that has just spiked, and to answer 1 when unsure.

When there is no mind

• No ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: hooks run as written and the line is a template, tagged template.
• Battery below the worst-case bill of a call, or tier low or dormant: no call.
• The call fails or the answer is not usable JSON: hooks run as written. A call that was made is still billed to the battery, because it was paid for.

What it costs

Measured against the real API (2026-10-16): a review costs about 0.0005 USD at claude-haiku-4-5 (about 250 tokens in, 44 out) and about 0.0018 USD at claude-sonnet-5-5 (about 330 in, 56 out). The journal's THINK line shows the real cost of each call, taken from the usage the API reports. The battery's worst-case bill (1,500 tokens in, 160 out) is a guard, not the usual price.

Why it is optional

The promises that matter, the caps and the rules, do not depend on it. The mind makes the organism careful in odd moments and gives its journal a voice. Turn it off and everything still works.