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Control Spend, Tripwires & Intelligence Toggles

Three overlapping controls keep your AI spend predictable: the Spend Gate sets a hard daily ceiling, the Tripwire fires when an unexpected model gets billed, and Intelligence Toggles let you turn off background calls individually.

Spend Gate — daily soft cap and hard ceiling

Section titled “Spend Gate — daily soft cap and hard ceiling”

The Spend Gate governs Sivants-billed API spend. It operates in three zones:

  • Under the soft cap: calls are covered by your subscription — no credits consumed.
  • Between soft cap and hard ceiling: calls draw from your Sivants Credits balance.
  • At the hard ceiling: all Sivants-billed spend is blocked until you manually raise the ceiling for that day. The gate resets automatically at midnight (America/New_York).

BYOK calls (your own Anthropic/OpenAI key) and free local Orbit operations are never gated.

Viewing the current state

Section titled “Viewing the current state”

When you’re near or over a threshold, a persistent banner appears at the top of the Orbit window. The banner shows which zone you’re in and the current day’s spend.

You can also query the state directly via the REST endpoint: GET /api/spend-gate/state.

Raising the ceiling for the day

Section titled “Raising the ceiling for the day”

If you hit the hard ceiling and need to continue:

  1. Click Raise Ceiling in the top banner, or call POST /api/spend-gate/raise-ceiling.
  2. Orbit grants a same-day override — spend above the ceiling is allowed for the rest of that calendar day.
  3. The override expires at midnight and the gate resets to its normal thresholds.

Note: if the Sivants API is unreachable, the soft cap fails open (spend continues), but the local hard ceiling still enforces regardless of connectivity.

Tripwire — unexpected model billing

Section titled “Tripwire — unexpected model billing”

The Tripwire fires whenever a model outside the Sivants-covered allowlist is billed. This protects against misconfigured routing sending calls to a non-subscription model.

When a Tripwire alert appears:

  1. A persistent banner shows which model triggered the alert.
  2. Check Settings → Model Tiers & Agents and confirm your tier assignments are pointing at covered models.
  3. If the charge was intentional (a one-off BYOK call), you can dismiss the banner.

The Tripwire does not block future calls — it only alerts. Use it as a signal to review your routing config.

Intelligence Toggles — background call controls

Section titled “Intelligence Toggles — background call controls”

Every background AI call Orbit makes (pre-checks, summaries, drift detection) costs quota. Intelligence Toggles give you per-feature on/off control.

  1. Open Settings → Intelligence.
  2. Under Automatic summaries & updates, you’ll find toggles for:
    • Code-impact pre-checks — flags large file scope and risky changes before a prompt runs
    • Completion-note enrichment — adds a short AI-written note to each completion log entry
    • Reference-doc auto-updates — keeps your context/orbit-reference-delta.md current after features ship
    • Handoff profile / README updates — refreshes project README and handoff docs after completions
    • Daily-summary narrative & patterns — drives the Story and Patterns tabs in the Daily Summary modal
    • CLAUDE.md drift checks — detects when agent rules have drifted from the canonical source
  3. Under Prompt review, a read-only row shows the current review gate setting (this is configured in Settings → Workflow / Model Tiers → Prompt Review, which is the largest single background spender).

Turning a toggle off truly stops the underlying call — no api_usage row is written. Each toggle shows a Saving… state while it persists.

If you use a BYOK provider key, a note on the Prompt review row reminds you that every background call bills your own key, not Sivants credits.

Section titled “Related”