The model downgrade is the most useful feature for daily use — when budget drops below a threshold, the plugin silently swaps claude-opus to claude-sonnet, gpt-4o to gpt-4o-mini. The agent keeps running, just cheaper. Only at full exhaustion does it stop.

The prompt hint (before_prompt_build hook) tells the model its remaining budget in the system prompt. Models self-regulate when they know the constraint exists — fewer unnecessary tool calls, shorter responses.

The underlying Cycles protocol handles idempotency under retries so concurrent tool calls don't double-spend against the same budget.

Happy to answer questions about the plugin or the protocol.