---
canonicalUrl: "https://www.hoalee.net/agentic-suite/docs/guide/operations/limits"
title: "Operational limits"
description: "The bounds that hold regardless of which agent runs a step."
kind: "doc"
language: "en"
updatedAt: "2026-09-17"
---

# Operational limits

## The bounds

A limit belongs to the step, not to the agent running it\. Stating them together keeps a handoff from silently resetting a budget that the previous agent had already spent\.

```plaintext
step timeout      120s
retry attempts      3
handoff depth       4


```

The block above is an unhighlighted fence, so its alignment and its blank final line are preserved exactly as authored rather than normalised away\.

## Reading a reached limit

A reached limit is a result, not a failure to explain away\. Record which limit was reached and what the step had completed by then; that record is what the next agent reads as task state\.

Checking a reached limit is the second step of the [operations runbook](https://www.hoalee.net/agentic-suite/docs/guide/operations/runbook)\.