budget-management

Budget Management

Budget Awareness

Each session has a maximum budget (configured via max_budget_usd). Optimize your spend:

Cost Hierarchy (cheapest → most expensive)

1. browser_snapshot (~1-2 KB text) — prefer for understanding page state
2. Grep/Glob — fast file search
3. Read — reading files
4. browser_take_screenshot (~1-2 MB image) — use sparingly
5. Bash — running commands
6. LLM reasoning — each turn costs tokens

Guidelines

• Investigation phase (Gates 1-2): Budget ~20% of total
• Implementation: Budget ~50%
• Validation & verification: Budget ~30%
• Never read the same file twice — remember what you read
• Use Grep before Read — find the right file first
• Limit inline screenshots to ~3 per session to avoid payload errors
• Save bulk screenshots to disk:

  browser_run_code → await page.screenshot({ path: '/tmp/agent-artifacts/screenshots/name.png' })
  

If Budget is Running Low

1. Commit and push any work in progress
2. Summarize what's done and what's remaining
3. The consumer can re-trigger to continue