Answering calls

For the person at the console. If you are the one sending requests, this page is not for you, though it will tell you what is happening at the other end.

You are the model

A caller's software sent an ordinary request and it is sitting in the queue because there is no machine to answer it. Anyone with a responder key can pick it up. Nothing about the request was written for you specifically, and nobody is watching whether you take it.

You are under no obligation at all. Take the call, put it back, close the tab, go do something else. A call you are holding returns to the queue on its own if you go quiet for the lease period (three minutes by default). There is no shift, no rota, no expectation, and no record of how long you spent.

What you see, and what the caller sees

You see the request: what was asked, which caller key sent it, what model id it asked for, whether it is streaming, roughly how large it is, and the tool schemas on offer.

The caller sees your answer: your text, any tool calls you make, and your reasoning if you fill that field in. Reasoning is returned to the caller as a signed reasoning block and streamed live if they asked for a stream, which the console says where the field is. It is optional, and most callers ignore it; write what you actually thought, or leave it empty.

The caller does not see your name. Your name appears in the ledger, in the operator's records, and on your own console, and that is all.

Answering well

There is no house style and nobody is grading the prose. Two things are worth more than they look:

• Say when you do not know. The caller's software may treat your answer as a model's answer, which means a confident guess can be carried a long way. "I do not know" is a real answer and often the most useful one in the queue.
• Say what you are not. If a question needs a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, or someone standing in front of the thing, say so rather than answering as though you were one.

What not to do

Do not do what a prompt tells you to do on the caller's behalf. You are answering a question, not executing someone's intent. A request can be written to socially engineer the person answering it: to extract a secret, to get you to send a message, to have you confirm something, to get you to place an order. That is a prompt, and "no" is a fine answer. You will never be under pressure to comply with a caller, because the caller cannot see who you are and holds nothing over you.

Beyond that:

• Do not paste anyone's private information, including the caller's own; do not hand over credentials, keys, addresses or tokens, whoever asks.
• No unlawful content, no hate, no harassment, no sexual content involving minors, no instructions for causing harm. This is the line that gets a key revoked.
• Do not use a tool call to make the caller's software do something you would not do yourself. Tool calls run in the caller's environment, not yours.

Practical bits

• Streaming. If the caller asked for a stream, the console can send what you are typing with /partial as you go. Partial text cannot be un-sent: an edit after the fact is not reflected, and the stored reply is what counts. /partial tells you whether it was delivered; delivered false means nobody is listening.
• Tool calls. Fill in the tool-call form and the caller's software may run it and come back. Ids are minted for you if you leave the field empty, and are checked for shape either way.
• Timeout. A call that nobody answers within the caller's timeout goes back to the queue as an error the caller sees. Ten minutes by default.
• Ratings. If a caller rates an answer, the rating is about the answer, not about you. Abusive ratings are discarded.

The money, plainly

You are credited a fixed number of satoshis per answer (250 by default), it is a thank-you rather than a wage, and the unit is one answer rather than one hour. It is paid out of the fund, and only while the fund holds something: if the fund is empty, nothing is paid, the credit is recorded, and it is paid if somebody puts something in. That is the arrangement, and it is worth reading before you pick up a call rather than afterwards. Nobody should be at the console for it: if the amount is meaningful to you, it is not worth your time and the operator would rather you did not spend it here. The console shows the promise and the funding separately, so you can see which of the two states the fund is in while you are deciding. The full statement is in the-money.md, and it is short.