Plan usage board shows energy, in kitchen terms

[debtn]

Adds estimated watt-hours and a household comparison to the steward Plan usage tab — per builder, and for the network as a whole. Follows from the energy design exploration.

Why this was cheap

The board already knew everything it needed. The proxy records input, output, cache-write and cache-read separately, per person per day per model, and the model recorded is the one that actually served — so outage fallbacks attribute correctly. Energy is a coefficient on top of that, accumulating through the same path as cost and landing beside it. No schema change, no new tracking.

How the number is built

Output tokens dominate: generating is sequential, one forward pass per token, memory-bandwidth-bound. Prefill runs in parallel and is far cheaper per token, and a cache read skips recomputation almost entirely — so the classes are weighted 1 / 0.15 / 0.15 / 0.05, the way the price weights already mirror billing.

Per-model scaling comes from each model's output price relative to Opus. Price is a proxy for serving compute rather than a measurement of it, but treating a day on Haiku like a day on Fable would be more wrong than this is, and the scalar only moves things 0.2–2×, well inside the band.

Two things the display is deliberate about

It always shows a band. The absolute coefficient is inferred, not published: from hardware it lands near 0.04–0.15 mWh per output token; from labs' per-prompt figures nearer 0.8–1.1 mWh. That's a spread of roughly twentyfold, and nothing outside a datacenter closes it. A single confident figure would read as a measurement. The token counts underneath are exact and stay separable from the coefficient, so it can be revised later without the history becoming a lie.

It compares to appliances, not vehicles. A whole project works out to about 376 feet of driving — which reads as "this is nothing", and inflating it to avoid that would be worse. A kettle, a phone charge, a day of the fridge sit at the same order of magnitude as the real number, so the comparison informs rather than dismisses. The anchor ladder climbs with the amount:

Scale	Reads as
One chat turn	less than a phone charge
One full build	about 1 phone charge
A builder, one day	about 1 kettle boiled
A builder, all time	about 1.3 loads of laundry
Whole network, all time	about 14 days of running a fridge

The note above the board says plainly that it's an estimate, and that builders on their own API key aren't counted at all — every metering call in llm-proxy is gated on community membership.

Files

File
src/lib/energy.ts	new — band multipliers, formatWh, the household anchor ladder, and the reasoning behind both
supabase/functions/admin-requests/index.ts	energy coefficients and energyUsage() beside the existing rates; wh accumulates through members, network totals and the 14-day series
src/cloud/community-usage.ts	wh on UsageTotals and the daily series
src/components/StewardPage.tsx	energy line under each headline tile and each builder row; the 14-day bar tooltips carry it too

Verification

Rendered the real UsageTab in a browser against the dev server with a stubbed report, and checked the strings across five orders of magnitude — from a single chat turn to the network's all-time total — to confirm the anchors ladder sensibly and nothing reads as "about 4,000 kettles". Two phrasings were wrong on the first pass and are fixed: about 0 phone charges for tiny amounts (now less than a phone charge) and ~<1 Wh–9.5 Wh (now under 9.5 Wh).

tsc -b and vite build clean; npm run lint unchanged at the 21 pre-existing problems.

Deploying

admin-requests is an edge function, so merging alone won't populate the numbers — it needs a deploy (per CLAUDE.md, via the Management API). Until then the board degrades gracefully: wh is absent, the guard suppresses the line, and everything else renders exactly as before.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01RFnFvBZPsVQjc5Xwj7H9nZ

---

Generated by Claude Code

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for GitHub.

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
relational-builder	Ready	Preview	Sep 2, 2026 7:07am UTC