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hermes-brain/ideas/cost-structure.org
Hermes 3e32ea9959 Promote entire passepartout-economics/ to ideas/ root
All 31 files from ideas/passepartout-economics/ promoted to ideas/ root.
- Subfolder's passepartout-economics.org (42-line index) renamed to
  triad-index.org to avoid collision with root-level full doc
- index.org removed (redundant — triad-index.org replaces it)
- Root-level passepartout-economics.org: stripped file:passepartout-economics/
  prefix from all cross-references (now simple file:foo.org links)
- compliance-framework-mapping.org: same prefix cleanup
- All internal file: links within the economics docs already used simple
  names (no prefix) — they resolve correctly from ideas/ root
2026-05-23 06:09:08 +00:00

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Cost Structure — Zero Marginal Cost

  • One-time cost: gate-rule encoding for a domain (from hours for codified domains up to months for tacit domains)
  • Near-zero marginal cost: ACL2 proof + Screamer consistency check + VivaceGraph lookup per interaction — all CPU-native, all in-image
  • No recurring LLM API costs for the 80% symbolic reasoning layer
  • After sufficiency flip: pennies per day vs dollars per day for LLM-only

The cost curve inverts: generation is expensive, verification is cheap. This is the inversion Passepartout exploits. This is the core insight of Lisp economics — symbolic verification costs approach zero while LLM token costs remain constant.

Token demand shifts from "every interaction burns tokens" to "only unfamiliar interactions burn tokens." Steady-state per-user LLM consumption drops by an order of magnitude.