User gives AI agent a $0.60 budget, two coding workers finish for $0.03 total
MickeySteamboat · x · 2026-10-05
MickeySteamboat ran a striking experiment: he gave Luna's Extra High Reasoning model a $0.60 budget for a set of tasks, simply telling it "this is what I'm going to pay you to do this." The agent planned its own spend and delivered — the first worker returned a comparator code proposal at a reported $0.017, and the second finished too, with both runs combined at an estimated $0.0304, visible in a monitor and sent to independent review.
The case shows how budget-driven agent prompting works: state the price, and the high-reasoning model paces its own usage and ships, at a tiny fraction of the allotted budget.
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