What is your budget policy for background agents that can retry overnight?

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

The article queries practical policies for managing budgets and retries in long-running AI agents to limit costs while allowing recovery from transient failures.

For an agent that runs unattended, the dangerous failure mode is not one expensive request; it is a small error that causes repeated tool calls or retries for several hours. I am looking for a practical policy that limits spend while still allowing the agent to recover from transient failures. Do you use a per-task token budget, a retry ceiling, time-based escalation, or separate model paths for planning, execution, and verification? I am especially interested in how you distinguish a recoverable tool failure from a task that needs human intervention. What guardrails have worked for your long-running agents?
Original Article

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