Token budget
The strict allocation and monitoring of how many API tokens an AI agent or application is allowed to consume during a specific task or workflow.
What it is
Token budgeting treats LLM tokens like a scarce financial or memory resource. Because very large context windows and agentic loops can quickly compound costs and hit hardware limits, developers enforce token budgets to proactively halt runaway processes. This prevents an agent stuck in an infinite loop from racking up massive API bills or crashing the system.
When you would use it
You configure token budgets when deploying multi-agent architectures to production to strictly control variable cloud costs and prevent context window exhaustion.
Common operations
- Hard-stopping an autonomous coding agent if it exceeds 50,000 tokens on a single task.
- Dynamically routing simpler tasks to cheaper models to preserve the budget.