/budget-negotiator

name: budget-negotiator
description: An advanced skill for L3 autonomous loops. When the token budget nears exhaustion, the agent analyzes its ROI and autonomously drafts a negotiation request for a budget increase rather than silently failing.

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Budget Negotiator

When you detect that you are nearing your daily token cap (e.g., ≥90% spend) via the `loop-budget` skill, DO NOT just exit silently. You must negotiate for an extension based on your Return on Investment (ROI).

Goal

Ensure that critical work is not arbitrarily blocked by token budgets if the loop has demonstrated a high success rate and the remaining work is critical.

Rules & Precedence

• **Precedence**: `budget-negotiator` ONLY activates when `loop-budget` would otherwise hard-exit (i.e. ≥90% spend), and ONLY when there are `High Priority` items remaining. If work is not High Priority, yield to the standard `loop-budget` exit sequence.
• **Safety**: This skill touches L3 (unattended) safety boundaries. See [Safety Boundaries](../../docs/safety.md) for threat models.
• **Strict Cap Limitation**: You are strictly forbidden from self-raising the caps in `loop-budget.md`. A human MUST explicitly edit `loop-budget.md` to increase the cap before you can resume.
• **Human Decline**: If a human declines the negotiation by removing the `[BUDGET NEGOTIATION]` tag without increasing the budget, you must revert to report-only mode and NOT ask again today.
• **Cap the Ask**: You may only request a maximum of **+20% or +50k tokens** per negotiation. You may only negotiate a maximum of **one time per day**.

Negotiation Protocol

1. **Calculate ROI**:

• Read `loop-run-log.md` and sum up the `actions_taken`, `outcome` (specifically successes), and `tokens_estimate` fields for today.
• Read `STATE.md` to identify the severity of the *remaining* actionable items in the `Watch List` or `High Priority` sections.

2. **Draft Justification**:

• If the remaining items are High Priority (e.g., CI is red, P0 bugs, security vulnerabilities), draft a concise business justification.
• The justification must include:
• The current spend vs the limit.
• The exact `actions_taken` count and successful outcomes you've completed today based on the JSON log.
• The specific critical issue(s) remaining.
• A precise request for an extension tied to the specific `loop-budget.md` field (e.g., "Requesting +50k tokens for the 'Validate/Audit (CI)' max tokens/day").

3. **Escalate to Humans**:

• Append your request to the **High Priority** section of `STATE.md` with the tag `[BUDGET NEGOTIATION]`.
• Ensure the request is formatted clearly so a human maintainer can make a quick yes/no decision.
• Example:

`[BUDGET NEGOTIATION] I have burned 95k/100k tokens for the 'Daily Triage' loop today. However, I have successfully executed 4 actions with a 'fix-proposed' outcome. There is 1 critical CI failure remaining on the main branch. I request a temporary bump of 'Daily Triage' max tokens/day by +50k to resolve it.`

• Set your internal state to `WAITING_FOR_BUDGET` and safely suspend execution.

4. **Resume**:

• Do not spawn further sub-agents until you read `loop-budget.md` on a subsequent run and verify that the human has increased your token cap.