Lesson 884 of 1596
Building a Budget-Aware Agent Planner
How to give the agent a token and dollar budget it must plan within, not just consume.
Creators · Agentic AI · ~24 min read
The premise
Cost-naive agents drain budgets; cost-aware agents prune steps before they spend.
What AI does well here
- Plan with an explicit token/dollar ceiling in the system prompt
- Estimate a step's cost before running it
- Trim or batch steps when the remaining budget is tight
- Surface 'I cannot finish within budget' as a first-class result
What AI cannot do
- Know exact costs without provider-side accounting
- Trade quality for cost without your stated preferences
- Recover gracefully from a hard cutoff mid-tool-call
Key terms in this lesson
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