The agent that takes a week

Some jobs are long. A literature-review agent reads 4,000 papers, checks citations, and drafts a report with sources. It runs six days, mostly waiting on model responses.

On platforms that bill wall clock, six days of a mostly-idle process is the worst shape there is: you pay for every second the agent spends waiting for a token.

On Hoody the agent runs as a daemon program in a container on a $29 server. The server has a monthly price; six days of agent don't change it. While the agent waits, the container burns no CPU. When it works, it uses cores the server already has.

Tokens are the separate story: your own Anthropic key, invoiced by Anthropic, or the Hoody AI gateway at 5% over provider cost from your AI Balance.

Wall clock stopped being a cost input the day the substrate went flat-rate.