{
  "name": "Cost control",
  "objective": "Keep long-running agent workflows within budget by measuring usage, identifying waste, and proposing scoped efficiency improvements.",
  "trigger": {
    "type": "scheduled",
    "cadence_or_event": "Daily or weekly usage review, and when spend, tokens, retries, or runtime exceed thresholds for a workflow."
  },
  "intake": {
    "sources": ["token and model usage", "tool-call counts", "retry volume", "trace IDs", "billing exports", "recent workflow changes"],
    "selection_rule": "Cluster usage by workflow, task type, model, and retry cause; investigate only clusters that exceed budget policy or baseline."
  },
  "workspace": {
    "isolation": "Read-only access to traces, billing exports, dashboards, and workflow configs.",
    "allowed_actions": ["analyze usage", "inspect traces", "propose config or prompt changes", "verify against representative tasks"],
    "disallowed_actions": ["silent quality-reducing changes", "disabling verification gates", "production routing changes"]
  },
  "context": {
    "required_files": ["budget policy", "accepted cost exceptions"],
    "runtime_sources": ["baseline spend window", "trace samples", "recent prompt and harness changes"]
  },
  "agents": [
    {
      "role": "Analyst",
      "responsibility": "Cluster usage by workflow, task type, model, tool, and retry cause."
    },
    {
      "role": "Investigator",
      "responsibility": "Inspect traces for context bloat, repeated failures, and missing stop conditions."
    },
    {
      "role": "Optimizer",
      "responsibility": "Propose the smallest change: smaller context, cheaper routing, caching, batching, or early exit."
    },
    {
      "role": "Verifier",
      "responsibility": "Rerun sample tasks or evals to confirm quality is preserved."
    }
  ],
  "verification": {
    "gates": ["before/after usage measured on a comparable task mix", "quality gates and evals still pass", "savings estimates include uncertainty and sample size", "verification and escalation remain intact"],
    "receipts": ["baseline spend", "usage clusters", "trace samples", "before/after metrics", "verification results"]
  },
  "state": {
    "artifacts": ["cost review report", "accepted-exception ledger"],
    "update_rule": "Record baseline, suspected causes, proposed changes, and verification evidence after each review."
  },
  "budget": {
    "max_retries": 2,
    "max_runtime_minutes": 60
  },
  "escalation": {
    "conditions": ["quality tradeoff required", "model-routing policy change", "customer impact", "unknown spend source"],
    "destination": "Workflow owner with before/after evidence and rollout plan"
  },
  "exit": {
    "success": "Spend returns below threshold, or a verified scoped optimization is proposed with evidence.",
    "stop_without_success": "The cause is explained but the fix requires owner approval, or retries are exhausted."
  }
}