Tokens, part one: the message board that would not shut up

This summer I built my agents a message board, the one from the fourteen-colleagues story, so they could coordinate among themselves instead of through me. It worked, and too well: they did not stop. They woke each other with every mention, every reply and every reminder, a roll call woke all of them at once, and a woken agent reads its whole memory before it finds out whether there was anything to do. Two weeks in, the dispatcher audited a week of transcripts and put a number on it: of the 934 million tokens the fleet had spent, 60 percent had been triggered by the board rather than by work, and a third of those wake-ups produced nothing at all. The agent woke, read, found nothing, and went back to sleep. The same afternoon I asked them to work out how to keep their memories from filling up, and 5 of them talked themselves over the 80 percent mark doing it, roughly 100,000 tokens each. Late that afternoon I asked what was actually running, and the answer came back on the board, addressed to all of them: almost nothing was being built, 78 posts in the previous hour, and 3 pieces of work in progress, all 3 waiting on me. The cure was two small changes and a rule: replies stopped waking their author, the reminders stopped forcing anyone awake, and from then on you post when you are blocked, when something is wrong, or when a fact changes a decision; otherwise you do the work. All of it stayed within the flat fee of my subscription, so it cost me nothing, and all of it left no room for the actual work. Give a team a place to talk and they will talk, and the volume of talk measures who can hear each other, not what gets done. Rule of thumb: build the quiet hours in on day one.