Stop-condition recipe · 2026-10-11

Budget and time ceilings for every agent run

Simple limits on spend, duration and actions per run, so a bad day stays a small one.

Retry limits stop loops on one task. Ceilings stop a whole run from getting out of hand. Every agent run should carry three numbers before it starts: how much it may spend, how long it may take, and how many actions it may take.

The three ceilings

1. Spend ceiling per run. A dollar figure for model calls, API usage and any paid tool. Start low. You can raise it once you know what normal looks like.

2. Time ceiling per run. A wall-clock limit. If a daily report normally takes four minutes, give it fifteen. Anything past that is a sign something is wrong.

3. Action ceiling per run. A count of side-effecting actions: files written, drafts created, records changed. Reads are cheap. Writes are where damage happens.

The recipe

RUN CEILINGS
- Before starting, state the ceilings for this run:
  spend $X, time Y minutes, writes Z.
- Check remaining spend before every paid call.
- When any ceiling is reached, finish the current step cleanly,
  save progress, and stop. Do not start a new step.
- Report: what got done, what's left, which ceiling was hit.
- Never raise your own ceiling. Ask.

Setting the first numbers

Run the agent three times with generous limits and watch. Take the highest spend, time and write count you saw, and set the ceiling at roughly double. That gives normal variation room without letting a runaway run go ten times over.

Daily and weekly caps on top

Per-run limits don't stop an agent that runs fifty times a day. Add a daily cap per agent and a weekly cap across all of them. Put the weekly cap on the provider side too, where the platform supports it, so the limit holds even if the agent's own checks fail.

The rule underneath

"Never raise your own ceiling" is the whole point. An agent that can extend its budget doesn't have a budget. It has a suggestion.

Hitting a ceiling isn't a failure. It's the system working. Read the report, decide if the limit was wrong or the run was, and adjust one of them on purpose.

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