Cost & Reliability
Token/member budgets, retries, optional members, and the false-success guard
Because a collaboration can call many agents, it ships with guards for cost and reliability. All are optional and set in the collaboration or per member (Edit → Cost & context, and per-member settings).
Cost controls
Set these on the collaboration:
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Max tokens / run | 300,000 | The run stops before executing the next member once cumulative tokens reach this ceiling. You still get the partial result. 0 = unlimited. |
| Max members | 12 | A run with more enabled members than this is rejected before spending anything. |
| Context char budget | 12,000 | (Sequential + Pass full context) bounds the total prior-step text each stage receives, so long pipelines don't balloon. |
The live trace shows tokens spent so far as the run progresses, so you can watch cost in real time.
Reliability (per member)
Each member has optional settings that make one flaky agent survivable:
Retries
Retry a member on a transient error (e.g. a tool timeout) up to N times with a short backoff before deciding it failed.
Optional
If an optional member fails, the run doesn't abort — it records the failed step, keeps the last good output, and continues. Use it for non-critical or flaky members. A required member's failure halts the run (the default).
Failure markers — the false-success guard
Sometimes an agent replies without an error but its answer is actually a failure (e.g. it couldn't reach a repo but says "all tests passed"). Failure markers are phrases you declare for a step; if the output contains one, the step is treated as failed even though there was no error — so a required step halts the pipeline with a clear reason instead of passing a wrong result downstream.
Failure markers: could not access, 404, permission denied
Recommended defaults
- Leave the cost caps at their defaults unless you have a reason to raise them.
- Mark flaky/non-critical members optional; add retries for members that call slow tools.
- Add failure markers to any step whose "success" could be misleading.
Editing after creation
Everything above is editable after a collaboration is created — name, members (add/remove/reorder), roles, enable/disable, and all the settings on this page — via Edit.