write budget
The turns an agent must hold back from research to actually write its findings down.
A write budget is the part of an agent’s run it is not allowed to spend on research. An agent gets a finite number of moves, and left alone it will spend every one of them reading, because from the inside, reading always looks like progress. The write budget holds back the last few moves for putting findings on disk. That reservation is the difference between an agent that helps you and an agent that thinks hard and hands you nothing.
I learned how this fails the direct way. A write budget written as a sentence in a brief is a wish, and wishes fall out of paragraphs when nobody is checking. Written as a validated field on the brief, it becomes a constraint the launch cannot proceed without. That sounds pedantic right up until the day the sentence goes missing and six agents come home empty after working the whole time. From a summary, you cannot tell busy and productive apart.