Agent Budget

An agent budget is a hard cap on how much an agent may consume before it must stop or escalate — measured in steps (loop iterations), tokens, tool calls, wall-clock time, or dollars. Because an agent decides its own next action, a bad plan or a loop of two agents talking past each other can spin indefinitely, quietly burning money and API rate limits; a budget is the circuit breaker that prevents a runaway run. When the limit is hit, the agent stops, returns partial results, or hands off to a human rather than grinding on. For builders, budgets are non-negotiable guardrails the moment an agent has real autonomy or touches paid APIs: set a max-steps ceiling to catch infinite loops, a token or cost ceiling to bound spend per task, and log usage so you can tune later. Pair budgets with clear stop conditions so hitting the cap is a graceful exit, not a silent failure.