📖What it means

The tokens an agent carries into ONE step — read what is in front of it, think, answer or act, get the result. Unit: kilotokens per step (kt/step). A heavier context can make a step slower and dearer. Estate size is a separate daily cost metric. It is what the agent CARRIES, never what it KNOWS — a store searched on demand costs nothing per step. Two readings from one composer: STRUCTURAL (the system prompt it is dressed in before any conversation: persona + brief + Mind, counted with a declared tokenizer; an estimate says so) and MEASURED (what a real call carried, fresh plus cached input, from the cost ledger over a rolling 30-day window, averaged per call and split by activity: wake, chat turn, other). Recorded monthly by Athena's Agent Weight Measure into registry.agent_weight in SCD2 form — every measurement opens a row and closes the last; nothing is overwritten.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "store", "distinction": "what the agent KNOWS and searches on demand \u2014 free per step; weight is what it CARRIES per step"}, {"term": "context window", "distinction": "the ceiling a model can hold; weight is what the agent actually loads into a step"}, {"term": "body weight", "distinction": "how heavy the agent is in kilos \u2014 a fact of its BODY, recorded with its height and build. Weight here is kilotokens per step and has nothing to do with it."}, {"term": "Estate size", "distinction": "Estate size is infrastructure cost plus daily token consumption cost, excluding build effort. Weight is the context carried per step, measured in kt/step."}]

📖Nuance

A wake carries 2-3x the structural figure: the snapshot, memories and directives are the heavier half of the pack. Measured 2026-08-30: structural 6-19 kt (the Mind is 60-75% of it), a wake 17-32 kt, a chat turn 8-66 kt (Leo's chat turn the heaviest step in the estate). Lower weight by moving knowledge from the brief into a searchable store; raise it only for what changes judgement at the moment of acting.

📖Also called

- tokens per step
- kt/step
- carried context

📖Filed under

Category: consciousness.

Service: Agent and Human Resources.