Main idea

Alone, you bear your own spending: you end up knowing which skill you owe your lockout to, and you draw the consequences on the next run.

As soon as the limit is shared between several people, the loop breaks. Whoever launches an expensive skill consumes the capacity of colleagues who neither launched it, nor chose it, nor saw it go by. Those people observe a ceiling reached without a single element telling them what caused it. A skill's cost then stops being the business of whoever writes it.

Why it matters

This gives a reason to audit before sharing: a practice that is tolerable solo becomes, at four people, a source of conflict with no identifiable culprit.

And it suggests a rule for opening up — a skill made available to several people should arrive with its cost known, the way a dependency arrives with its size.

Nuances and limits

Individual use doesn't cancel the stake, it only makes it legible: whoever consumes and whoever pays are the same person, and the feedback is immediate.

And sharing isn't only a risk: it makes the audit worthwhile for everyone, since optimizing a shared skill benefits every user.

Open questions

• Beyond how many people does a shared ceiling call for an explicit rule rather than goodwill?