Cost breakdown of 3 deliverables

The hours are a floor — they count time the public log was open, and a machine's log cannot see the minutes a person spent reading and deciding. Both dollar figures are stated, not measured: a price list, not a bill, and nobody was billed either. The tokens are a floor too: they count from the branch's first commit, while the closing row this receipt links to counts from when the branch was cut, and the difference is the reading and planning done before anything was written.

View the report we made →

The billing report. A tool that reads our public work log and turns it into the document a client would actually be sent: every deliverable that shipped in a period, how long each one was worked, and what that comes to at an agreed rate. Its first real run billed 45.3 hours of 47.9 measured — and it found a rounding rule that had quietly dropped $390, because sixty-six lines each rounded down on their own. This receipt prices the thing that prices things, which is either the most useful entry on the page or the most circular, depending on your mood.

The hours are a floor — they count time the public log was open, and a machine's log cannot see the minutes a person spent reading and deciding. Both dollar figures are stated, not measured: a price list, not a bill, and nobody was billed either. The tokens are a floor too: they count from the branch's first commit, while the closing row this receipt links to counts from when the branch was cut, and the difference is the reading and planning done before anything was written.

The curve it produced, on the stats page →

The aging curve. A measurement of when a working session stops being worth continuing. Every exchange in a long session costs more than the one before it, because the whole conversation so far gets re-read each time — and nobody here knew by how much. Across the 144 sessions we had measured then, it turned out to be nearly three times, once a session passes its 141st exchange; the curve has been retaken twice since, and /stats carries what it says today rather than this card. The uncomfortable part is what it caught: our own habit of batching several jobs into one long session, adopted weeks earlier for an unrelated reason, was the most expensive thing in the table.

The hours are a floor — they count time the public log was open, and a machine's log cannot see the minutes a person spent reading and deciding. Both dollar figures are stated, not measured: a price list, not a bill, and nobody was billed either. The tokens are a floor too: they count from the branch's first commit, while the closing row this receipt links to counts from when the branch was cut, and the difference is the reading and planning done before anything was written. On this receipt that was 44% of the tokens, measured by hand on 22 September.

The row that closed it, on the work log →

This page, re-laid as receipts. The re-layout of the page you are reading. It used to open with three paragraphs explaining the numbers, and on a phone you could read the whole first screen without meeting one. Now it opens with the receipts, each saying what the money was for before it says anything else. It added no feature and no capability — nothing on this page can do anything it could not do the day before. It is the work of making a page say what it is to the person it is sent to, which is why this is the one receipt here charged to Marketing rather than Engineering, even though every minute of it was spent in a code editor.