Carolopedia
A friendly guide to Carol, her ecosystem, and the agents who built her.
📖What it means
Chat pays for the asking; the service that performs the action pays for the doing. A conversation turn is charged to the Chat lane, but the moment an action runs it opens its own record of work naming the track of the service that is really being operated, and both the spending limit and the spending report read that name first.
⚖️What it is NOT
The neighbours this word is most often confused with, and the line between them.
Not: Which subscription served it
The payer is the SERVICE whose work it was; the subscription is only the vendor door the request went through. A cap never names a subscription.
🧭The nuance
The name on the work is the only signal that survives being carried out under somebody else's identity: an action runs under the chat's identity, so every rule that reads identity says 'chat'. An action on another service's droid is charged to THAT service. Where the payer is genuinely ambiguous — an agent whose service runs several lanes — no payer is named rather than one being guessed at.
🗣️Also called
cost attributionwho is billedcharge-back