Tool Budget Guard

Tool Budget Guard

An agent with no budget does not fail loudly, it fails expensively. It retries the same broken command nine times, re-reads a file it already has, and burns twenty minutes before anyone notices. This harness puts a ceiling on tool calls, tokens and wall-clock time, and, the part most budget code skips, says exactly what happens when the ceiling is hit.

When to use

• Any long-running or autonomous task where nobody is watching each step.
• Agents that call paid APIs, where a loop is a bill.
• Any agent that has ever gotten stuck repeating itself.

Install

npx openagents-cli add openagents/tool-budget-guard

What is in the package

• HARNESS.md - the budget model, the checks, and the escalation ladder.
• budgets.md - starting numbers by task shape, and how to tune them from real runs.

License

MIT