write budget
The turns an agent must hold back from research to actually write its findings down.
A write budget is the portion of an agent’s working life it is forbidden to spend on research. An agent gets a finite number of moves. Left alone, it will spend every one of them reading, because reading always looks like progress from the inside. The write budget reserves the last few moves for putting findings on disk, and it is the difference between an agent that helps you and an agent that thinks hard and hands you nothing.
It earns a definition because of how it fails. A write budget written as a sentence in a brief is a wish, and wishes fall out of paragraphs when nobody is checking. A write budget written as a validated field on the brief is a constraint the launch cannot proceed without. The distinction sounds pedantic until the day the sentence goes missing and six agents come home empty, having worked the whole time. Busy and productive are not the same thing, and from a summary you cannot tell them apart.