Why AI Agents Need Runtime Budgets Before Provider Calls (opens in new tab)

The problem Most AI cost control happens too late. A provider dashboard can tell you what happened after the API calls already executed. That is useful. But it does not stop a bad agent run while it is happening. For basic LLM usage, this may be acceptable. You send one prompt, receive one response, and check the cost later. Agents are different. An AI agent is not one call. It is a loop. That loop may include: model calls tool calls retries fallback models growing context planning steps vali...