Spending
An agent that books its own next turn is one that goes on running with nobody watching, and until there is a ceiling the first anyone knows of a loop is the bill.
Dollars a day, and a day that belongs to the plane
defaults:
limitUsd: 5
US dollars a day, counted across every turn and reset at midnight UTC — the plane's midnight, since one of the two machines has to decide when the day turns over and it is the plane that enforces it. In defaults it covers the agents made later at the keyboard too, which are exactly the ones nobody remembers to put a ceiling on; an agent's own block narrows it, and leaving it out is no ceiling at all.
What a turn cost was reported on the feed all along and added up nowhere, which is the same as not knowing.
It stops the agent taking turns, not a turn in flight
The point is not to kill work halfway, which has already been paid for, but not to start more. Nothing is lost: messages that arrive while it is over the ceiling are in the conversation, written down when they arrived, and the plane says there why it is not answering. That matters more than it sounds, because a plane that quietly stops answering is indistinguishable from a broken one. The next day it goes on.
/limit, and both halves in the conversation
> /limit $0.42 spent today, against no limit. > /limit 5 Spending limit set to $5.00 a day. $0.42 spent today, of $5.00 a day.
/limit moves it for one agent without editing the file. Both halves go into the conversation, because that is where they were typed and where the answer gets read: a ceiling that changed with nothing to show for it is one nobody can later work out the reason for.
/limit off means no ceiling and not "forget I said anything" — the config's value does not come back, since reinstating the ceiling somebody was in the act of removing is a surprise they would find out about by hitting it.
On the row, before it is a question anyone asks
│ agents │ │ │ │ ● demo $4.10 │ │ ○ scout │ │ │ │ + new agent │
What each agent has spent today is on its row, because "which of these is burning through its day" is a question about all of them at once and the header can only ever answer it about the one you are standing on. The figure turns yellow at four fifths of the ceiling and red at it. An agent that has spent nothing says nothing — a column of $0.00 is noise to read past, and what is being looked for here is the row that is not like the others.
The title row says what the selected agent is thinking with and what that has cost against what it is allowed. Both were already crossing the socket and being thrown away, and the price of that was that the way to find out which model an agent was answering badly with was to go and read the operator's config file.
To be held to less, never to more
‹ask› /limit 50 This agent asked for a ceiling of $50.00 a day, which is above the $5.00 it has. It can ask to be held to less, never to more: /limit $50.00, if you meant it.
A ceiling is the one setting the keyboard may touch, and it is safe for the reason a grant is not: it can only ever take capability away. So an agent may ask to be held to a tighter one and gets nowhere asking for a looser one — and the refusal hands the operator the line they would have typed, at the moment it is the answer, in the pane they were already looking at. The console has the rest of what an agent may ask for.