The Long Thread Was Not the Expensive Part
I built a fix for a thread-length complaint before I had measured where the tokens went, and the measurement came after. The long thread was real, and it was still the smaller pile. Next time I will count the subagents first.
The Long Thread Was Not the Expensive Part
A hub session’s main thread processed 37.5M input tokens, while its 26 subagents processed about 280M, roughly 7x as much. The top eight children, burn-down passes, the goals lane and organize units, each grew to 220k to 308k tokens by walking many tickets inside one context, and the goals lane (36.4M) and organize units (24.5M) are single long tasks no ticket rule touches. The new hook asks a child past 120k to hand off at each new ticket, saving an estimated 31.4M (10%) on hand-labelled real starts, 66.4M (21%) at the upper bound; whether agents obey the ask is unverified. If you run agent fleets, measure subagent context before tuning the main thread.
Moving leads.jsonl Off One PC Into a Durable Object
Our lead ledger was one file, leads.jsonl, on one PC, and read_leads returned [] when the file was missing, so a lost file read as zero leads. A dependency audit flagged it as row D6 ten days after the module’s docstring called its sources verified on 9/30/26. I moved the ledger into a Cloudflare Worker backed by a SQLite Durable Object, and RemoteLedger now raises on any failed read or write. The local jsonl path is kept for tests and offline runs and still returns [] when the file is missing, so if a report counts from a file, check that a missing file cannot pass as a true zero.
Four Blog Tooling Paths Now Share One Function and 16057 Tests Passed
Four places in our blog tooling, the digest, social, lesson and daily_backfill code, now get a post’s URL id from one function, url_id in the new blog/urls.py, and that id carries no date. The commit pairs with a matching change in the landing site’s repo, and the split-gate fell back to a full local run where 16057 tests passed. A separate commit the same day backfilled work_date provenance for 394 of 695 published posts. Because url_id is the only place a file name becomes a URL id and the id has no date, redating a post does not change its link.
If you have ever had a report quietly show zero because its data source was missing, reply and tell me how you caught it.
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Ben Downey