Put cost caps in the orchestration harness, never in billing alerts

Digital Applied·medium signal

Budget ceilings belong in the loop itself, not in after-the-fact billing alarms. Use the Claude Agent SDK's ~25-turn-per-subagent default as a hard stop, Vercel AI SDK 6's stepCountIs(N) or a custom predicate over the usage object (it has no built-in token-budget helper), and LangGraph checkpointers with explicit step budgets — so a runaway agent is bounded before it spends, not flagged after.