Budgets and Limits

Ennodia can estimate the input-token budget before a costly run starts. The estimate is a budget limit check, not a provider invoice. Child-task estimates are lower bounds.

Harness system prompts, file reads, tool calls, and provider-side context are not visible before the run.

Use it before parallel work or long reviews. Also use it when the user limits cost, subscription use, or child-task count.

What the Estimate Includes

ennodia_estimate_budget reports:

• selected harness count
• selected harness identifiers (IDs)
• if Compare is planned
• prompt input estimate
• potential Compare input from bounded candidate outputs, capped by the same 24,000-character per-candidate truncation used in the judge prompt
• subscription-limit check status when a supported local surface exposes it
• any exceeded local limits

The estimate does not claim to know provider billing, output tokens, tool-call cost, cache behavior, harness-internal context, or private subscription quota.

Estimate Before a Run

{
  "tool": "ennodia_estimate_budget",
  "arguments": {
    "prompt": "Review this release.",
    "mode": "parallel",
    "compare": true,
    "maxOutputChars": 20000,
    "budget": {
      "maxChildTasks": 4,
      "maxEstimatedInputTokens": 120000
    }
  }
}

If the estimate is too high, use one or more of these changes:

• Select fewer harnesses.
• Make the prompt shorter.
• Decrease maxOutputChars.
• Use a narrower first pass.

Enforce Limits on a Run

The same budget object can be passed to ennodia_run:

{
  "tool": "ennodia_run",
  "arguments": {
    "prompt": "Review this release.",
    "mode": "parallel",
    "compare": true,
    "maxOutputChars": 20000,
    "budget": {
      "maxChildTasks": 4,
      "maxEstimatedInputTokens": 120000
    }
  }
}

Ennodia checks these local limits before child tasks start. The run fails early if estimated input tokens or the child-task count exceed a cap. Ennodia does not start the excess model work.

Subscription Limits

Subscription quota checks are conservative by design. Ennodia uses only supported local command-line interface (CLI) and application programming interface (API) surfaces.

If a provider does not expose account quota through a supported surface, Ennodia reports the limit as unknown. It does not inspect private account pages or create an unsupported value.

Today every built-in harness reports subscription quota as unknown because no supported local surface exposes a reliable account limit. An older fail-closed quota gate has been retired until at least one current harness exposes a real supported quota surface.

Practical Defaults

• For a first documentation or code audit, start with two or three harnesses.
• Use maxOutputChars to keep Compare input bounded.
• Keep maxChildTasks set when the prompt may route to many adapters.
• Treat unknown subscription-limit status as a transparency signal, not proof that a run is cheap or expensive.

See the exact tool schema in Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools.