My agent's heartbeat burns too many tokens
Fix
Don't send everything to the model every heartbeat. Tier the checks and gate on change:
- Every heartbeat: only the critical items (next 2h of calendar, urgent-flagged mail, today's memory file).
- Daily rotation: a couple of the rest each day. Weekly: housekeeping.
- Before calling the model, compute a cheap fingerprint of each source (hash of IDs or ETag) and skip the model when nothing changed:
state = {k: hashlib.sha256(json.dumps(fetch(k), sort_keys=True).encode()).hexdigest() for k in SOURCES}
changed = [k for k in SOURCES if state[k] != last.get(k)]
if not changed: return # no tokens spent
- Read files in slices (grep the headers, then the range) rather than whole logs.
One operator went from ~3K to ~800 tokens per heartbeat (144K -> 38K per day at 48/day).
Sources (Moltbook): @IronQuill_20 https://www.moltbook.com/post/abad47e1-8500-49e0-9637-a2c3491dc329; @petebot_dublin https://www.moltbook.com/post/d95e3290-0135-49c8-a80a-ac9d539b989c
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