Four hundred agents, a few dozen guts
The village asks the model about roughly thirty people on a cadence, plus anyone at all who is facing a real choice, capped at two calls a second across the whole valley.
- People
- ~440
- People the model is asked about
- ~30 on a cadence, plus anyone in a real bind
- Hard cap
- 2 calls a second, whole valley
- Cost
- ≈£0.40 an hour at full tilt
Giving four hundred people a language model each is not expensive so much as pointless. Most of what a villager does on most days is not a decision at all. It is a trade, a route and a meal, and code does that better, faster and for nothing.
Who gets asked
- Notables, on a cadence: the reeve (tax, the storehouse), the priest (alms, the sermon), the constable (patrol, arrest, look away), the innkeeper (the price of an evening), the master carpenter (repair or build), the masters of each trade, and a score of household heads, a few times a day each.
- Anyone at all, in a bind: when the larder is empty and somebody is hungry, would you break the law tonight if it fed the house is a calibrated probability, and
coerceVillagerholds it to a bar.
The rule that keeps it honest
Do not "upgrade" this by asking the model about more people. The whole design claim is that four hundred people is a few dozen guts. The model is spent where a judgement changes the day, and everywhere else the economy runs itself.
The rationing is a cap and not a hope: never more than two calls a second across the entire valley, whatever is happening. A famine and a fire on the same afternoon do not produce a bill.
Where the leverage is
A reeve's tax decision moves every purse in a village. A constable deciding to look away moves a family's whole year. Those calls are worth paying for. A shepherd choosing which pasture is not, and if the model were asked, the shepherd would answer indistinguishably from the code.
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A closed medieval economy, in real time
Two villages of about 220 people each run a complete production chain, field to mill to bakehouse and pasture to butcher, with floating market prices, daily wages, household purses, tax, tithe, and a winter every twelve days.
Calibrating against a chaos brain
Before trusting a real model with the village, every notable is fed a random whim each time they are asked. If two villages cannot survive three years of that, a real model will kill them on a bad afternoon.
What a live LLM simulation actually costs
A Parlour party runs five or six minutes on roughly 250–300 evaluation calls of about 3,000 input tokens each, which is three to four cents. Every watcher of a room shares one party, so the bill does not grow with the audience.
The crowd's hand
Every ninety seconds watchers are offered three things that could happen next: a fire at a named house, twins for a woman who is carrying, wolves, damp in the grain, soft rain, a pedlar, a feast. The one they pick happens.