When your agent needs to spend more than you told...

You deploy a research agent with a $100 budget. The task is competitive landscape analysis: a few market reports, some API calls, a handful of web lookups. $100 is plenty. Three weeks later, the scope changes. You need licensing data across 40 markets instead of 5. Same agent, same task, fundamentally different cost. Doing it properly runs $800. What happens next depends entirely on how you set the budget. If you hardcoded a ceiling, the agent stops midway and you get a partial result. If you di