Budget ceiling
A hard limit on turns, tokens or wall-clock time, enforced by the host rather than requested in the prompt.
By Lattice editorial · Entry last reviewed · method
What it implies
The instinct is to write 'you have at most ten turns' in the system prompt. That does not work: a prompt is a suggestion to a system good at generating plausible text, with no privileged access to its own budget. Every guarantee you give a user about an agent is a promise the host is keeping.