One pattern we keep seeing: teams set a max budget or max iterations, but the expensive part usually starts earlier, when the agent keeps retrying without new evidence.
A better stop rule seems to be: before another retry, the agent should show what changed, what verifier passed, and what would make the next attempt stop.
One thing we learned building MartinLoop is that the expensive part is usually not the first mistake. It is the polite retry loop after the first mistake, when nothing important has changed and the system keeps spending anyway.\n\nThe most useful rule we found was simple: before another retry, show what changed. If the answer is basically 'nothing useful', stop the run.\n\nIf you have seen an agent burn time or budget in a boring way instead of a dramatic way, that is the failure mode we care about most.