Agent run budget
An agent run budget is a hard limit — tokens, cost, iterations, or wall-clock time — attached to an autonomous agent task and enforced live by the runner, which kills the run when the limit is crossed rather than warning about it afterwards.
Budgets are what make overnight autonomy financially safe. An advisory budget is a suggestion the agent can burn through; an enforced budget is a process kill at the threshold, with the partial cost and the reason recorded in the run's report.
Budgets compose: a goal can carry a budget for the whole objective while each run carries its own, and the operator sees the burn-down live.
related terms