Merge pull request #8 from thebuilderweekly/draft/token-budget-enforcement

Draft: Stop your AI agent from running up a thousand-dollar bill overnight

Author: govindkavaturi-art

entries/token-budget-enforcement/README.md

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+# Stop your AI agent from running up a thousand-dollar bill overnight
+
+An agent looping on a malformed input can burn through a month's API budget in 20 minutes; a budget-enforced agent stops itself before the bill arrives.
+
+This is part of [AI Building Tutorials](https://github.com/thebuilderweekly/ai-building-tutorials) by [The Builder Weekly](https://thebuilderweekly.com).
+
+**Read this tutorial:**
+- [In this repo](./tutorial.md) — the raw markdown with code blocks
+- [On the web](https://thebuilderweekly.com/tutorials/token-budget-enforcement) — rendered with diagrams and syntax highlighting
+
+## What this tutorial teaches
+
+**Before:** Your agent hits an edge case that puts it in a retry loop. By morning you have a thousand-dollar Anthropic invoice and an angry email from your CFO.
+
+**After:** The agent tracks cumulative spend per session and per day, throttles when approaching limits, switches to cheaper models when over thresholds, and stops entirely before damaging your bill.
+
+## Tools used
+
+anthropic-api
+
+## Pillar
+
+[Foundations](https://thebuilderweekly.com/tutorials/pillars/foundations)

entries/token-budget-enforcement/metadata.json

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+{
+  "id": "token-budget-enforcement",
+  "title": "Stop your AI agent from running up a thousand-dollar bill overnight",
+  "slug": "token-budget-enforcement",
+  "pillar": "foundations",
+  "clusterTags": [
+    "budgets",
+    "rate-limiting",
+    "cost-control"
+  ],
+  "soulLine": "An agent looping on a malformed input can burn through a month's API budget in 20 minutes; a budget-enforced agent stops itself before the bill arrives.",
+  "beforeState": "Your agent hits an edge case that puts it in a retry loop. By morning you have a thousand-dollar Anthropic invoice and an angry email from your CFO.",
+  "afterState": "The agent tracks cumulative spend per session and per day, throttles when approaching limits, switches to cheaper models when over thresholds, and stops entirely before damaging your bill.",
+  "status": "drafted",
+  "author": "builder-weekly-bot",
+  "contributors": [],
+  "tools": [
+    "anthropic-api"
+  ],
+  "createdAt": "2026-04-12",
+  "lastVerifiedAt": "2026-04-12",
+  "freshnessWindowDays": 90
+}