The stored 3.28 chars/token (measured 2026-10-11) had drifted to 3.20 as the
repo's docs grew, so leg B sent ~201,900-token prompts and took a legitimate
400 from the engine's own window check — which reads as a capacity-contract
failure on a healthy endpoint. One ~4k-token request now prices the ratio, and
the leg sizes to 97 % of the deployed window.
The shape block and boot ledger now quote the live 1.8.1 boot: experts 20.72 GiB
(78 %) / kv cache 5.64 GiB (21 %) = 747,492 tokens, 3.7 full-length sessions,
`--checkpoint-slots 40`, `queue_cap 32`, sampler 12 rows, `experts-from-host`
8.99 GiB a rank.
The KV Capacity law is rewritten from the pinned source instead of inference:
`core/mem/vram_budget.cpp:146-156` funds the cache as `elastic - expert_floor`,
`core/mem/kv.cpp:266` sets its ceiling from `max_seqs x max_ctx` (demand, never
funding), and `core/place/planner.cpp:100-104` makes the expert floor fall
one-for-one with `--host-pool-mib` — which is why +4,224 MiB of pinned host pool
bought the pool and cost 3.01 GiB of residency a card. The old "funds ~90 %,
never 100 %" phrasing was inference; the byte-identical 45,568 row is the ceiling
case, not a mystery. Slot-cost law carries the four-slot price (state +
checkpoint store + rows, still under the 25-row exact-wire bound). The two-slot
era is one row in Eras with its rollback commit. Date stamps in the trio
comments corrected to 2026-10-20.
Frank