You know the drill. You switch to the smaller model to save the good one for later. You check the percentage before starting anything big. And when a reset is hours away with tokens still left, you burn them on nothing, because unspent feels like wasted.
Rationing when it's scarce. Splurging before it expires. Either way, the meter is making the decisions.
The condition has a name. You are tokenbroke.
In the summer of 2026 we were handed the most powerful tools of our working lives. They came with meters.
We adapted, because adapting is what we do. We watched percentages the way farmers watch the sky. We saved the hard problems for after the reset. We learned to spend curiosity like a budget. The finest engineers of a generation taught themselves to think less, and to feel grateful for it.
And beneath it all, one loop kept running. Limits tighten. The timeline fills with grief. A lab grants a reset, and we applaud. Then it starts over.
Here is the strange part: every one of us knew our own suffering to the decimal point, and none of us could see the whole of it. The labs hold the full picture. We, whose work paints that picture, hold anecdotes.
So we built the instrument ourselves. tokenbroke reads the truth from our own machines and files it on one public record. Built, of course, with the very tools that ration us.
There are no forms, no screenshot uploads, no self-reported numbers. The only door onto this record is a command that reads the usage state your tools already keep on your machine. One person can be slightly fake. The aggregate cannot.
It never touches your prompts, your conversations, or your credentials. Every line of the reader is public, and the published package is provably built from that public code. Don't trust us. Read it.
You arrive as starving-crab-42. Your name goes on the record only if you put it there yourself.
One row is a roast. Ten thousand rows are the only public telemetry of how rationed this industry actually is.
We are their heaviest users; that is how we got this broke. The pressure is real, and so is the affection. Neither works alone.
Right now, relief arrives when a very small number of people decide the complaints have gotten loud enough. We want to make that decision easy. Enough of us on the record, and generosity stops being a support ticket.
Rationed infrastructure decides who gets to build. Nobody here is asking for free. We are asking for abundant.
A reset radar with live countdowns. Drain velocity. Days-since counters that make silence legible. A single pane of glass for the question every agent-era developer asks daily: what is going on with my tools? We intend to make it accurate enough that the labs end up watching it too. That is the endgame: a shared instrument, watched from both sides.
This manifest is not signed in ink. It is signed in usage data.
developers have signed.
filed under protest. (affectionately.)