Cap runaway agents with Anthropic task budgets, not just max_tokens

20-40% of tokens on long agentic loops that would otherwise over-explore or truncate mid-action and get retried Advanced 3 min read

A per-agent task_budget gives Claude one advisory token countdown across the ENTIRE loop (thinking + tool calls + tool results + output), so it paces itself and finishes gracefully instead of over-exploring or cutting off mid-action and forcing an expensive retry.

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