The dispatch ladder

Every unattended start is priced off one table: the board's Effort (XS..XL) picks the
model and the reasoning effort the agent is started on. The table lives in
`ladder.json` beside this file — read it for the current rungs rather than
copying them. hoopit-board reads it through the ladder path in its config
(hoopit-board init --ladder); next prices every candidate off it at every tick,
start-backlog-daemon passes each rung to claude --model <model> --effort <effort>, and
review-dispatch is the only procedure that moves a rung.

A config with no ladder leaves next pricing nothing — a session can still rank the board
— and the daemon refuses to start, since every agent it started would inherit the CLI's
defaults.

• models and efforts list the axes cheapest first; that order is what "under" means.
• rungs maps each Effort to a {model, effort} pair.

The rule

No rung is priced under a smaller one. Rungs compare by model first, then effort, both
in the order the axes list them; hoopit-board refuses to load a ladder that breaks this.
It is a ladder over model and effort together — checking effort alone is the wrong test,
since XS and S differ by model, not effort.

Two adjacent rungs may be equal. That costs two things: the Effort between them no longer
changes what an agent is given, and hoopit-board dispatches groups by model/effort, so
the two tiers' work pools into one row that review-dispatch can no longer read apart.

Every rung names its effort. An unset one would inherit ~/.claude/settings.json
(effortLevel, and modelSettings per model), which a dispatch must never depend on.

Model names are aliases

model is a Claude Code alias (sonnet, opus, fable), resolved by the installed CLI
at start. A CLI update can move an alias to a newer model with no change here — confirm
what one resolves to with
claude -p --model <alias> --output-format json ok, whose modelUsage names the model.
The claim comment records the alias, so the dispatch record cannot tell two versions behind
one alias apart; say so when reading a window that spans an alias moving.