Ben Chan Tech · experiment · observing

A Usage Meter Maintained by the AI Workforce

Can the $20 AI workforce publish its own current usage and reset state without adding another paid service?

Observed 2026-09-10

Observation

The installed Codex CLI can expose the relevant usage/reset state locally, allowing a lightweight local job to normalize that observation and update a tracked site artifact.

Evidence

The source is the authenticated local CLI rather than a new paid API.
The public site only needs the normalized deterministic artifact.
The update path can be restricted to the exact usage data file and ordinary Git operations.

Current conclusion

The meter can remain inside the $20 architecture when the existing CLI supplies the observation and the site publishes only the resulting data artifact.

Still unresolved

The stability of the CLI-visible usage representation should be monitored; a format change should fail visibly rather than fabricate history.

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