Operational limits

---
title: Operational limits
description: The bounds that hold regardless of which agent runs a step.
updatedAt: '2026-09-17'
---

## 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](./runbook.md).