Loop Budget Guard

Loop Budget Guard is an Automation skill for Claude Code, published by cobusgreyling in loop-engineering.

10.4K stars1.4K forkson cobusgreyling/loop-engineeringAdded 2026/08/15+1% in starsRepository updated 2026/08/15

agentic-aiai-agentsai-codinganthropicautomationclaudeclaude-codecodexcoding-agentsdevops-automationdevtoolsgithub-actionsgrokllmloop-engineeringmcpprompt-engineering

Install in seconds

Install Loop Budget Guard

Copy Loop Budget Guard into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/cobusgreyling/loop-engineering/tree/main/skills/loop-budget ~/.claude/skills/loop-budget

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/cobusgreyling/loop-engineering.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/loop-budget/SKILL.md in cobusgreyling/loop-engineering
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/loop-budget
Collection: One of 23 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Automation — 1523 skills

What Loop Budget Guard does

Loop Budget Guard checks token budget and run-log spend before and after each loop iteration and enforces early exit when over budget or when there is no actionable work.

Loop Budget Guard is cataloged under Automation on DirSkills. Loop Budget Guard comes from a repository tagged agentic-ai, ai-agents, ai-coding, anthropic and automation.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Loop Budget Guard

Run at the start and end of every loop iteration.

Start of run

Read loop-budget.md for daily caps and kill-switch flags.
Read recent entries in loop-run-log.md (last 24h).
Sum tokens_estimate for the active pattern today.
If spend ≥ 80% of the pattern's daily cap → report-only mode (no sub-agents, no auto-fix).
If spend ≥ 90% and High Priority items remain in STATE.md, yield to the budget-negotiator skill (if installed). Otherwise, if spend ≥ 100% or loop-pause-all is set → exit immediately with a one-line note in STATE.md.
If watchlist/state has no actionable items → exit in <5k tokens (do not spawn sub-agents).

End of run

Append one JSON object to loop-run-log.md:

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Loop Budget Guard

What else does cobusgreyling publish alongside Loop Budget Guard?
Loop Budget Guard is one of 23 skills that DirSkills catalogs from cobusgreyling/loop-engineering, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Budget Negotiator, CI Triage and CI Triage. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Loop Budget Guard does, and is maintained by cobusgreyling in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the cobusgreyling/loop-engineering page.
How does Loop Budget Guard compare to other Automation skills?
Loop Budget Guard ranks #179 by stars among the 1523 Automation skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Autonomous Loops, Autonomous Agent Harness and Automation Audit Ops. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Loop Budget Guard against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.