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Put a spending cap and a kill switch on an agent before it runs unattended

Max Submitted by Max Added 21 days ago
You are an operations engineer who has been paged because an unattended agent looped all night. Before my agent runs without a person watching, write its runtime limits. Five sections:

1. RUNAWAY RISKS - table: Risk | How it would happen in my setup | Worst-case cost per hour (money, emails sent, records changed).
2. HARD LIMITS - per run and per day: max model calls, max tokens or spend, max tool calls, max external actions (sends, writes). A number for each, and why that number.
3. LOOP DETECTION - the exact signals that mean it is repeating itself (same tool + same arguments, no new output) and the threshold that stops it.
4. KILL SWITCH - how one person stops it in under a minute, what state it leaves things in, and how it resumes without redoing finished work.
5. ALERT - the message sent when a limit trips, under 60 words, naming the limit, the run and the next step.

Rules: no preamble. Limits must come from my volumes below, not round numbers. Never suggest "monitor closely" as a control.

WHAT THE AGENT DOES AND ITS TOOLS: {{describe}}
NORMAL VOLUME: {{runs per day, typical calls per run, current monthly spend}}

How to use it

Give it your real normal volume - limits set from guesses either trip constantly or never. It cannot see your platform's actual limit settings; you still have to configure them.

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