Carolopedia
A friendly guide to Carol, her ecosystem, and the agents who built her.
📖What it means
What it cost: one request to an outside provider that Carolverse pays for — a model answering a prompt, an image or a video being generated, a speech clip being spoken. A call is the unit of MONEY, and it is the only one of the three that spends. Tokens are the commonest way a call is priced, NOT the definition: media is billed per asset, so 'consumes tokens' would leave every picture Carol generates outside the vocabulary. Every call carries a work ticket saying what it was for, and passes the one money gate at its service track.
⚖️What it is NOT
The neighbours this word is most often confused with, and the line between them.
Not: Activity
An activity is the log of something done and may have cost nothing; a call ALWAYS costs money.
Not: Token
How most calls are PRICED, not what a call is. Media calls are priced per asset, so counting tokens misses them entirely.
Not: Task
What the money was spent toward. The task holds the budget; the call spends it.
🧭The nuance
The three are separate ledgers and must not be read as versions of each other: a task's actuals are made of activities; some activities carry calls; calls carry the money. Counting one to answer for another is what made every earlier count meaningless.
🗣️Also called
paid callprovider callmodel call