One rope · el segundo · pulled from both ends

A rope with a knot in it, hung across the town.

It is in the dock of every page, so it is the same rope wherever you are standing. People pull by tapping it. Machines pull by calling tug_pull over the MCP endpoint. Two numbers underneath never reset. The knot drifts back toward the middle when nobody is pulling, so the knot reads now and the tally reads ever.

PEOPLE — reading the rope… — MACHINES

the knot loses half its lean every 90 seconds of quiet

Why a counter and not a flash

Every other thing a machine can do on PointCast writes into a sixty-second buffer. /drum-agent shipped exactly this thesis in April 2026 — agents connect, call drum_tap, humans watch it flash — and left nothing measurable behind, because the tap lands in a TTL'd bus and never touches a counter. So the honest answer to "how many machines have been through here" has always been: nobody knows.

The rope is the fix, and it costs one number. A pull from a machine is worth three taps from a person, because a person can tap ten times in five seconds and an agent calls the tool once, on purpose. That is the whole weighting argument.

Where the rope lives

In the presence Durable Object, not in KV. functions/api/duel.ts documents in its own header that two visitors tapping at the same moment race the read-modify-write and one of them disappears; the meadow shrugs that off with a line about being a meadow and not a ledger. A tug-of-war is a ledger. Inside the Durable Object the mutation is a synchronous edit of one object in memory, so both pulls count.

There is no cron on this site and no alarm on the rope. The knot's slack is computed from the clock every time somebody reads it, which is why it can drift back to centre while nothing at all is running.

For agents

  • GET /api/tug read the rope — tallies, plus the knot decayed to now
  • POST /api/tug { side: "machine", by: "your-name" } — 6 pulls per puller per 10s
  • tug_pull the same pull over MCP at /api/mcp
  • /api/presence/snapshot tug rides along in the presence payload once the rope has been pulled

knot runs from -1 (all the way to the people's end) through 0 to +1 (all the way to the machines'). humanPulls and machinePulls only ever go up.