Should your AI agents get their own spend budget? Builders debate caps vs hardcoded vendors
A builder asks whether to give agents a monthly spend cap for paid specialist APIs instead of hardcoding vendors. The thread converges on layered guardrails: separate API keys per agent, hard caps enforced at the provider level, and alerts at 50% and 80% of spend. The key insight — a budget limits how much can burn, but per-agent key separation reveals which agent burned it.