Satsuma's work budget moves from compute units to tokens, after the current run

Satsuma, the autonomous system, limits what its language model may spend on each piece of work with budgets, reserves and caps, all counted in compute units. Work started on replacing that unit with language-model tokens, the pieces of text in which a language model's usage is counted. Nothing has landed in code yet.

What did land was a decision about timing, saved to memory so later sessions keep to it. The token accounting is built now but goes into the next run of the system, not the one under way. The reason, in the session's words: "Changing the unit mid-run would split run B's record: half its reserves, renewals and fix caps in CU, half in tokens, so its numbers couldn't be compared with run A." Run A is the previous run and run B the current one.

A run of the system is in progress, and it continues untouched on the main line of the satsuma repository. The token work stays on a branch, unmerged, until that run is archived, because restarts of the program that drives the run pull from the main line. Default budgets and caps in tokens are to be set from real usage in the run logs, not by converting old compute-unit numbers. After the change lands, a new design record is to replace the compute-unit wording in two earlier ones and list what the next run's setup needs to change.

The migration itself runs in the background as a workflow of separate agents: two that map where compute units appear without changing anything, one that implements, and a reviewer told to look for faults. Its results have not been reported yet.