http://programmer.ie/tags/budgeting/ Recent content in Budgeting on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:53:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-16/ Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:53:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/post/advanced-agents-from-first-principles-16/ <h1 id="where-should-an-agent-spend-its-compute">Where Should an Agent Spend Its Compute?</h1> <p>A production agent has a budget whether you designed one or not.</p> <p>Every model call costs something.</p> <p>Every search node costs something.</p> <p>Every tool invocation costs something.</p> <p>Every verifier costs something.</p> <p>Every retry adds latency.</p> <p>Every escalation to a stronger model spends money and time that could have been used somewhere else.</p> <p>The naive architecture gives every subsystem its own fixed limit:</p> <div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#f8f8f2;background-color:#272822;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-python" data-lang="python"><span style="display:flex;"><span>MAX_STEPS <span style="color:#f92672">=</span> <span style="color:#ae81ff">20</span> </span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>MAX_SEARCH_NODES <span style="color:#f92672">=</span> <span style="color:#ae81ff">32</span> </span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>MAX_CRITIC_CALLS <span style="color:#f92672">=</span> <span style="color:#ae81ff">3</span> </span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>MAX_RETRIES <span style="color:#f92672">=</span> <span style="color:#ae81ff">4</span> </span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>MAX_VERIFIER_CALLS <span style="color:#f92672">=</span> <span style="color:#ae81ff">2</span> </span></span></code></pre></div><p>That looks safe.</p>