A bigger budget wouldn't have helped — a static cap just delays the same burn. Same broken agent, run three ways through the Guardrail gateway. Fake money, real logic.
The breaker hashes each tool call and cuts the run when the same signature keeps failing —
so it tells a stuck loop from a long, legitimate task. It runs on the request path, per run,
not a day late on the invoice. Open source: github.com/amih/guardrail ·
part of the AI cost + safety playbook at smallestbusiness.com.