{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "builder_plan": {
    "scenario": "Start with one repeated product task that has a measurable failure or cost.",
    "change": "Read the methods and identify one change you can isolate in that workflow.",
    "baseline": "Your current implementation on the same held-out tasks.",
    "steps": [
      "Locate the paper's implementation and check its license, model support, data needs, and hardware requirements. Stop here if you cannot obtain the required artifacts.",
      "Save a small set of representative product tasks and expected outcomes. Keep evaluation tasks out of any training or tuning, and choose quality and cost limits before running.",
      "Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.",
      "Save per-task outputs, failures, timings, and all usage costs. Review regressions before expanding the test."
    ],
    "measure": "Successful outcomes, response time, human rework, and total cost per successful task.",
    "decision": "Keep the change only if it meets your preselected quality and latency limits and improves the metric you care about after setup and operating costs. Otherwise retain the baseline. This is an exploration plan, not a validated recommendation."
  },
  "builder_review": null,
  "arxiv_id": "2609.24991",
  "title": "Who Pays for the KV Cache? Attributing Shared AI Inference Spend Across Kubernetes and LLM Provider Bills",
  "summary": "unalloc replaces ad-hoc reconciliation of disconnected cost sources (OpenCost allocations, LiteLLM gateway logs, OpenAI/Anthropic per-token bills) with a single joined ledger that reports the share of spend lacking an owner; it is a CLI tool, so adoption costs only integration effort against existing logs and billing APIs, with no GPU, latency, or model-quality impact. It can fail silently at system seams: labels applied only to leader pods left 66% of a constructed multi-pod GPU bill unowned, a fallback key masked this by assigning 61% to a Helm chart name, enabling every source double-counts gateway spend, and single-page billing API reads report only a quarter of spend.",
  "rationale": "The tool runs against logs and billing APIs the reader already produces, requires no additional infrastructure, and directly reduces the risk of misattributed inference spend that distorts per-tenant pricing and capacity decisions.",
  "technique": "Unified LLM inference cost attribution ledger",
  "family": "outro",
  "recommendation": "adotar",
  "published": "2026-09-21",
  "as_of": "2026-10-18",
  "editorial_status": "indexed",
  "source_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24991",
  "independent_implementations": 0,
  "total_implementations": 0,
  "stars": 0,
  "citations": 0,
  "claims": [
    {
      "claim_id": "claim-01",
      "statement": "unalloc replaces ad-hoc reconciliation of disconnected cost sources (OpenCost allocations, LiteLLM gateway logs, OpenAI/Anthropic per-token bills) with a single joined ledger that reports the share of spend lacking an owner; it is a CLI tool, so adoption costs only integration effort against existing logs and billing APIs, with no GPU, latency, or model-quality impact. It can fail silently at system seams: labels applied only to leader pods left 66% of a constructed multi-pod GPU bill unowned, a fallback key masked this by assigning 61% to a Helm chart name, enabling every source double-counts gateway spend, and single-page billing API reads report only a quarter of spend.",
      "basis": "inferred",
      "result": "",
      "baseline": "",
      "conditions": "",
      "source_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24991",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    }
  ],
  "exposure_map": [
    {
      "dimension": "quality",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "compute",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "latency",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "operations",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "compatibility",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "security",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "data_and_training",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    },
    {
      "dimension": "reproducibility",
      "basis": "not_evaluated",
      "finding": "",
      "interpretation": "",
      "limitation": "",
      "next_check": "",
      "source_url": "",
      "source_page": null,
      "source_excerpt": ""
    }
  ],
  "risks": [],
  "minimum_test": [],
  "open_questions": [],
  "independent_tests": [],
  "lab_reproductions": [],
  "report_available": false,
  "validation_tier": "unknown",
  "evidence_tier": "unknown",
  "infrastructure_basis": "unknown",
  "equations": [],
  "equations_status": "not_fetched",
  "core_kind": "",
  "equations_fetched_at": "",
  "equations_source_url": "",
  "equations_source_sha256": "",
  "exposures_reviewed_at": "",
  "exposures_source_sha256": ""
}