What to expect

How long a mint takes, what it costs, and why a job can show minting for an hour.

What happens when you click Mint

A consensus mint sends your document to three readers. Each reader is a different AI model, and each one gets the same codebook and the same single document. No reader sees another reader's answer. No reader sees another document.

When all three have answered, an arbiter reads the three sets of answers and marks where they diverge. It does not pick a winner. It shows you what the readers disagreed about and what in your codebook would settle it.

The row in your project shows minting from the moment you click until all of that has finished. Then the inspection page opens with every answer, the quote each reader took it from, and the reasoning each reader gave.

A quick mint sends the document to one reader and runs no arbiter. You get answers and evidence, and no disagreement to read.

Consensus costs more because it runs three readers and the arbiter instead of one reader. Quick mint costs about a tenth as much on the standard engine, because one reader does the whole job.

How long it takes

Speed depends on how busy the AI models are that day, and on how many other people are minting at the same time. It does not depend much on how many documents you sent. Documents run in parallel with each other. The three readers inside one document also run at the same time. The phases of a codebook run one after another.

A row that sits at minting for a long time is almost always waiting in a queue behind other people's jobs. That is a capacity problem on our side, not a fault in your codebook and not a fault in your document.

When a job sits

1. Wait. Your other documents keep running while this one waits.
2. Refresh the page. The row updates on its own, and a refresh confirms what the server currently holds.
3. Leave a long-running job alone. A quick mint gives up after 25 minutes. A consensus mint gives up after 3 hours. Until then the job finishes or fails on its own.
4. Click Cancel to stop a job you no longer want. Cancel returns the mints for the work that has not been done.
5. Email karl@datamint.ing when a whole batch sits. One slow document is normal. Twelve documents stuck for two hours is ours to fix.

Failed means the readers did not return a usable answer within the time allowed. A failed job is refunded in full. Open the three-dot menu on the row, reset it, and mint it again.

What it costs

On datamint.ing you pay in mints. One mint is one penny.

Every mint is priced on what the readers actually do: the pages they read, the fields they fill, and which class of model does the reading. A table column costs more than a plain field, because a table means structured multi-row output.

The quote you see before you click is the guard. You see the price for the exact set of documents you selected, and the job cannot charge past it. If the price has moved since the quote was drawn, the site refuses the job and shows you the new one.

Pro multiplies a text consensus mint by five. Pro is for very long documents and for codebooks with twenty or more items. The Pro models tend to handle harder concepts better. That is a tendency, not a rule. Bigger models know more, and it is hard to say in advance which topics they know better.

Questions are welcome at any size. Write to Karl before a run that would spend more than 20,000 mints, so he can watch it with you. Start small before going big.

How many documents at once

Start with a handful, 5 to 10 documents, and not more than 20, while you are still settling the codebook. Send more only when agreement is running high and you need more documents to find the disagreements. That is enough to learn from and few enough to read in one sitting.

Do not push hundreds of documents through the Mint button yet. The button submits them one by one into the same queue everyone else is in, and a run that size will sit for a long time. For a run of hundreds, write to Karl first. He will set it up so it does not sit in the everyday queue.

That is the honest state of it today, not a permanent limit.

Things that look broken and are not

1. Browser zoom above 100% hides the mint controls. At 125% the configure controls sit below the visible area of the panel, and the page gives no cue that anything is down there. The screen reads data is being loaded and stays that way. Set the browser zoom to 100%, or scroll down inside the panel, and the controls are there.
2. The sign-in code can be used once. The code is good for two hours and stops working after it is entered. Read it on any device, and type it into the browser you want to work in. If the site says the code was already used, request a new one from that browser.
3. Some university mail servers reject our sign-in email. The message is sent and silently dropped before it reaches you. Sign in with a personal address instead.
4. The scanned-document warning is a guess. The site flags a PDF as scanned more eagerly than it should. Click through and read the extracted text. If the text is there, overrule the warning and mint it as text.
5. The codebook switcher is small and sits under the upload box. Switching codebooks changes which columns the spreadsheet shows. It deletes nothing. Each codebook version keeps its own minted documents and its own inspection page.

Where to get help

Office hour, Tuesday Sept 29, 1 to 2 pm Central: https://meet.google.com/jpd-fnwg-nad

Email Karl any time: karl@datamint.ing

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