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Budget Negotiator

When you detect that you are nearing your daily token cap (e.g., ≥90% spend) via the loop-budget skill, DO NOT just exit silently. You must negotiate for an extension based on your Return on Investment (ROI).

Goal

Ensure that critical work is not arbitrarily blocked by token budgets if the loop has demonstrated a high success rate and the remaining work is critical.

Rules & Precedence

• Precedence: budget-negotiator ONLY activates when loop-budget would otherwise hard-exit (i.e. ≥90% spend), and ONLY when there are High Priority items remaining. If work is not High Priority, yield to the standard loop-budget exit sequence.
• Safety: This skill touches L3 (unattended) safety boundaries. See Safety Boundaries for threat models.
• Strict Cap Limitation: You are strictly forbidden from self-raising the caps in loop-budget.md. A human MUST explicitly edit loop-budget.md to increase the cap before you can resume.
• Human Decline: If a human declines the negotiation by removing the [BUDGET NEGOTIATION] tag without increasing the budget, you must revert to report-only mode and NOT ask again today.
• Cap the Ask: You may only request a maximum of +20% or +50k tokens per negotiation. You may only negotiate a maximum of one time per day.

Negotiation Protocol

1. Calculate ROI:

   • Read loop-run-log.md and sum up the actions_taken, outcome (specifically successes), and tokens_estimate fields for today.
   • Read STATE.md to identify the severity of the remaining actionable items in the Watch List or High Priority sections.

2. Draft Justification:

   • If the remaining items are High Priority (e.g., CI is red, P0 bugs, security vulnerabilities), draft a concise business justification.
   • The justification must include:
     • The current spend vs the limit.
     • The exact actions_taken count and successful outcomes you've completed today based on the JSON log.
     • The specific critical issue(s) remaining.
     • A precise request for an extension tied to the specific loop-budget.md field (e.g., "Requesting +50k tokens for the 'Validate/Audit (CI)' max tokens/day").

3. Escalate to Humans:

   • Append your request to the High Priority section of STATE.md with the tag [BUDGET NEGOTIATION].
   • Ensure the request is formatted clearly so a human maintainer can make a quick yes/no decision.
   • Example: [BUDGET NEGOTIATION] I have burned 95k/100k tokens for the 'Daily Triage' loop today. However, I have successfully executed 4 actions with a 'fix-proposed' outcome. There is 1 critical CI failure remaining on the main branch. I request a temporary bump of 'Daily Triage' max tokens/day by +50k to resolve it.
   • Set your internal state to WAITING_FOR_BUDGET and safely suspend execution.

4. Resume:

   • Do not spawn further sub-agents until you read loop-budget.md on a subsequent run and verify that the human has increased your token cap.