Updates · September 4, 2026
Nothing bills while nobody is working
An empty office should not be paying rent. If nobody is working today then nothing should be quietly running up a bill in the background, and that is a harder promise to keep than a low monthly average, because an average is very good at hiding a light left on all night.
A quiet household shouldn't pay rent on an empty office. So Chatticus holds no always-on process in the token path, and there's no load balancer parked in front of the API waiting for traffic that isn't coming. The transcript is DynamoDB. A stream is scoped to one turn, and reconnecting is just a new request that reads chunks already committed.
The computer is summoned when a turn needs it, not assumed at login. Readiness is per-capability — talking, files, browser — so a bot's first word can land while the machine behind it is still coming up.
Zero at idle is the requirement. A design that's cheaper on average but charges rent all night loses.
Workers pull jobs; the control plane never reaches into a garage Mac. The same Ubuntu image runs on Fargate, EC2, and local Docker, and durable disk is an S3 snapshot plus a local cache on whichever host is current.
This is written down so we can't quietly trade it away. Design challenges lists the requirements and, just as importantly, the non-requirements. Messaging is the transcript and the one-turn stream. If a later post contradicts those two, believe those two until we publish a correction.