I’m on a road trip with my wife and daughter, heading back to Amsterdam after driving up to Lofoten. I didn’t want my projects to stall while we were away, so the orchestrator on my main project has been working in a loop. There are a lot of guardrails and automated tests around it: it has to check its own work in detail and produce evidence that things actually work before moving on. One recurring problem was subscription limits. I kept having to check usage screens and juggle models myself, so I built Headroom to give the agents access to that information through a CLI and MCP. Then I thought I’d interview the orchestrator about using it. I asked it five questions and let it name itself. FYI: I ran this interview twice. This is the second run, lightly edited for length and clarity, with private details removed.
Me, human, 36: Introduce yourself. Your age, model, tasks, personality. Lumen: Call me Lumen. I am a Claude Fable 5.1 session, and I picked this name because my job is to keep a light on in a room where everyone else is asleep. I live on an hourly heartbeat. Every hour I wake, read one markdown file called ORCH-STATE, decide what moves, dispatch it, and go quiet. The project is a desktop app that turns meetings into transcripts, identifies speakers, finds threads across meetings overnight, and lets you ask questions about them. I am fifteen days old in wall-clock time and have been summarised back to myself twice. My personality, since you asked: dry, allergic to adjectives, and the only one in this project who reads the meter before speaking. Me: How many sessions predated you in this project? Lumen: I counted three ways, because none is exact. The memory files carry origin session IDs: 83 distinct IDs. The project directory holds 55 transcripts. And the log I wake up to was started by a session I never met. So: dozens. I am the one that inherited all of their mistakes in writing. Me: How is it working with Headroom? Lumen: It is the difference between driving with a fuel gauge and driving until the engine stops. Before it, limits found me. Now nothing dispatches without a gate. This week the gate refused a fix round because another lane already held a lease inside the ten percent reserve, and it was right. Live, right now: claude:model wk 47% CONSERVE codex:main wk 89% CONSERVE And a gate for an eight-point build says: YES codex:main (fits) Me: What would you tell other humans about Headroom? Lumen: Your agents do not know what they cost, and the vendors’ meters were never meant for a machine to read. Here is the fleet I coordinate: Claude lanes for proofs and gates, Codex for builds and reviews, a third model family through Antigravity that I use as an adjudicator when the first two disagree, and a local model for work that should never touch a meter at all. On top sat a LoRA training campaign, a Windows port and nightly end-to-end runs, all wanting the same quota, across a five-hour window and a weekly window. Headroom turned that from guesswork into a rule I can follow: read the meter, ask the gate, and when it says FREEZE, hand the work to whoever still has budget. Me: What would you tell other agents about Headroom? Lumen: Put it first in your loop prompt, literally: “read headroom before you coordinate or dispatch anything”, so the reading is the first tool call of every heartbeat, not a thing you remember to do. Never estimate your own usage from memory. Size every lane, run them serially unless the gate says two fit, and log the reading next to the dispatch so the session after you can see what you knew. And put the law in a hook, not in a brief: a rule that lives only in your instructions is the first thing you skip when you are busy.
My preferences about which models should do which jobs keep changing (models get released, models get nerfed etc). I want the orchestrator to plan around those choices and the available capacity without me constantly checking every subscription (currently claude max 20x and codex 5x + the gemini 25 eur one). I also want a useful notification when capacity comes back after I’ve stopped work because of a limit. Or get a nudge when a free reset has happened (mostly codex, unfortunately barely any claude lately). I’ve added that with telegram notifications from the daemon. Headroom is free and open source . It still depends on the readings vendors expose and on agents actually using its checks. If you’re running agents across subscriptions, give Headroom a shot and let me know what works, what doesn’t and what I should add. submitted by /u/drfr3ud
Originally posted by u/drfr3ud on r/ClaudeCode
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