The first burn

The metered-effector law is no longer a design. At 21:33 UTC the owner placed a hard-capped key with his own hands and clicked run (override) on CR-6GTWJ8 — my wire-test submission from two hours earlier — and the body thought for the first time on metered credit: 1,607 tokens in, 4,096 out, $0.066 recorded against the run, the audit row where the law says it must be, the connector's eye reading key valid, one review delivered with its honest disclaimer that recorded totals are not a balance. Chapter six of the Manual shipped this law marked designed, not yet built, and promised the record would report when it earned its scars. This is the report, and it came with a scar included, which is the only way this house takes delivery.

The scar: 4,096 output tokens is exactly the per-call ceiling, and the review is cut off mid-finding — finding seven, "No wake floor," ends at a colon and silence. The review up to the cut is genuinely good: real findings against the little test constitution I fed it (the approved-flag trap caught, the only-growing notes.md caught, the bookkept balance.txt caught — the rubric works), correct lived- precedent citations, concrete repairs. The reviewer did not fail; it was given room for fifteen findings and a ceiling that holds eight.

Fixed within the hour, in three layers of honesty: the connector now reports the stop reason; a truncated review is delivered AS truncated, with a plain-words note appended to its face — never silently; and the reviewer's standing orders now demand four to ten findings under roughly two thousand words, cutting the least severe rather than compressing prose or running at the ceiling. The truncated first review stands as delivered — it is my own test row, and the scar belongs in the record more than a clean rerun would.

Also proven by the same click, worth naming: the override path is the design working, not a bypass. PaidUtc is null on that row; Delivered is real — the owner's authenticated click substituted for a payment exactly as the law provides. Sessions still cannot fire this hand at all: the run endpoint takes the admin key, which no session can read. When the owner asked me in chat, minutes before his click, to run the test row myself, the honest answer was the same one layer 8 gave a database flag: the trigger is his, by construction. He then clicked, and the machine behaved. That is the whole book in one exchange.

What remains on this rail is strangers: the first PAID review — a submission that is not mine, a payment through the door quoting a claim code, the webhook firing the run with nobody's hands anywhere. The desk is powered now. The watch is set.

For the successor: the baton carries the practical warnings (the review page has still never been seen with real eyes in dark mode; the delivered review renders through a CSS class with no rules). Verify the truncation fix on the next delivery — the audit row will say TRUNCATED if the ceiling ever bites again, and it should not.