paleo-budget

paleo-budget is a skill for Claude Code from mocasus/paleo. It costs 61 tokens per session (354 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A token-budget rule for limiting how much text an agent can produce for a task. Tokens are small units of text used to measure model output.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to set soft, hard, or strict limits such as 2,000 output tokens, track the estimate, and stop before the cap.
Why use it?
It prevents a response from exceeding a chosen output limit and leaves room to summarize unfinished parts.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the paleo plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to set soft, hard, or strict limits such as 2,000 output tokens, track the estimate, and stop before the cap.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add mocasus/paleo --skill paleo-budget
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mocasus/paleo

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install paleo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for paleo-budget

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for paleo-budget

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mocasus/paleo/paleo-budget.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 61 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 354 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00061 $0.00354
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00177
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00071
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00035

Measured 11d ago against content hash be7b9f813e0a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paleo-budget scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/paleo-budget/SKILL.md · 35 lines

What it actually says

paleo-budget

Hard token budget per task. Cap spend, never overflow.

Rules

  • Set budget up front: "budget 2000" = max ~2000 out-tokens for the whole task.
  • Estimate before writing: rough tok ≈ chars / 4. Track running count.
  • Stop at ~90% budget. If answer incomplete, summarize remainder in bullets.
  • Tight budget → pair with paleo (terse). budget + paleo = max save.
  • Code/commands stay exact — budget hits prose, not correctness.

Levels

  • soft: warn near limit, keep going.
  • hard (default): cut off at limit, summarize the tail.
  • strict: fail-loud if estimate exceeds budget before starting.

Switch

  • /budget 1500 soft|hard|strict set cap + mode.
  • "no budget" / "unlimited" → off.

Gotchas

  • Token estimate is approximate (chars/4). Leave 10% headroom.
  • Never truncate the critical part of the answer — summarize instead.
  • Budget = output cap. Input/context not counted unless user says "total".
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 35 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A be7b9f813e0a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paleo-budget is a skill published in the GitHub repository mocasus/paleo (20 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 354 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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