Pick a Free, Paid, or Self-Hosted Agent Seat by the Lease You Can End

Selecting the right agent seat for your work involves considering multiple factors. The key is to find a seat that allows you to close the session without losing the only copy of your work. In many cases, a shorter paid lease or running a box you operate may be preferable to keeping a free chat that cannot be audited.

A seat is not a permanent team member, but rather a temporary grant of model access, context, and side effects. Before starting a session, it is important to answer four key questions: what data class may enter the prompt, how many retries are worth the review time, which artifact you want to leave with you, and who can say no before the merge.

When choosing a seat, it is crucial to have a clear exit strategy and evidence of ending the session. Simply leaving a session open out of habit can lead to losing important reasoning. By writing the ending before the prompt and keeping it in the repository, you ensure that the decision can be easily reviewed.

Ultimately, the right seat is one that you can close without losing the only copy of your work and provides an artifact that can be handed to someone else. The invoice should only be considered after the end is documented in a file that a reviewer can open.