How do you enforce a hard per-task budget so an agent stops before it overruns?
Everyone says 'cap the budget'. The signal is the enforcement mechanism: a budget object that travels with the run, checked before each call rather than after, with reserved headroom for a final answer and correct accounting across sub-agents.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Everyone says 'cap the budget'. The signal is the enforcement mechanism: a budget object that travels with the run, checked before each call rather than after, with reserved headroom for a final answer and correct accounting across sub-agents.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
