Use Cases & Recipes

BudgetAI fits interactive terminal work, one-shot automation, and always-on channel agents. Here are common starting points.

Interactive coding

budgetai chat

Use this for exploratory work where you want to steer the agent turn by turn.

One-shot automation

budgetai agent -m "Summarize this repo and list what to test" --max-usd 0.10

Great for CI-like runs and scripts. The --max-usd flag attaches a budget.

Make the tests pass

budgetai agent -m "Fix failing tests in ./api" \
  --done-when "pytest -q" --on-breach escalate

See Outcome Contracts for the full contract syntax.

Scheduled research

budgetai cron add "0 8 * * *" -m "Summarize overnight GitHub issues"

See Scheduling.

Team assistant in chat

Connect a channel, give it a budget, and let it help where your team already works.

budgetai configure channels
budgetai channels status slack --json

See Channels and Channel Budgets.