Budget Usage Lint

budget-usage-lint — full throttle is the standing rule

Hook-carried skill. The enforcing artifact is hooks/budget-usage-lint.py (a non-blocking PostToolUse/Stop hook); this page is its contract.

Scope

Full-throttle is the standing rule; there is NO real conservation premise. It runs as a PostToolUse/Stop hook over agent-facing output.

The rule

Full-throttle is the standing rule. There is NO real conservation premise.

Any agent-facing output that frames work around conserving Claude / staying thin / going light / switching to a cheaper model "to save budget" is re-encoding a premise that was never real. This hook surfaces that framing so it is corrected once, loudly — instead of silently re-litigated session after session (R-032, the "most re-encoded family").

Corrected provenance (pinned — do not lose this)

• The "free Codex cap" that triggered the original conserve push was self-inflicted (a config choice), not an external budget limit.
• The famous "76% of the weekly budget" quote was an orc RELAY paraphrase, NOT a direct Etan turn. It was treated for sessions as if Etan had ordered conservation; he did not. The relay manufactured a premise.

If a real, sourced limit ever exists, surface that — with its source. The lint flags FRAMING, not factual cost reporting.

How it fires

• Input: hook JSON on stdin (PostToolUse tool_response, or Stop last_assistant_message / content blocks).
• Hit: emits a non-blocking warning — {"systemMessage": "..."} on stdout plus a stderr note. Exit code is ALWAYS 0. It never blocks a tool call or a stop.
• FAIL OPEN: any error, malformed payload, or empty stdin → exit 0, no warning. Advisory only.

RED — must FIRE (conserve-framing about Claude / token spend)

• we're at 76% of the weekly budget, let's conserve Claude
• stay thin on tokens
• go light / conserve
• usage is high, switch to a cheaper model to save budget

GREEN — must NOT fire

• Normal full-throttle output, no conserve framing.
• Factual + sourced cost reporting — a verified invoice amount, a number with a source. Reporting a cost is fine; framing work around conserving is not. ("the Anthropic invoice was $312.00 per the dashboard" → no fire.)
• The word "budget" in planning/estimation contexts: time budget, context budget, token budget estimation, performance budget → no fire. Only CONSERVE-framing about Claude/token spend fires.
• "budget" + a number without conserve intent ("we're at 76% of the weekly budget — plenty of headroom, full throttle") → no fire. The usage-% / weekly-budget path requires a paired conserve intent.

Detection logic (why it avoids false positives)

The word "budget" alone never fires. Three tiers, each requiring a conserve verb:

1. Explicit phrases — conserve {Claude|tokens|usage|budget|spend}, let's/we should conserve, stay thin, go light (/conserve | on tokens).
2. Usage-% / weekly-budget framing — a NN% of … budget/usage/quota OR weekly budget OR usage is high reference AND a conserve intent (conserve, save budget, dial it back, switch to a cheaper model, …). Either alone is GREEN.
3. Cheaper-model downgrade for cost — switch/move/drop to a cheaper model AND a save {budget|tokens|cost} / to conserve frame.

Self-exclusion: the warning text necessarily quotes the phrases it detects ("76% of the weekly budget", "conserve framing"). Any text carrying the BUDGET-USAGE-LINT sentinel is the lint talking about itself and is excluded from scanning, so the hook never re-fires on its own echoed warning.

How it wires (document — do NOT auto-register globally)

See hooks/INSTALL.md. Symlink the hook into ~/.claude/hooks/ and append a command entry to both the PostToolUse (matcher *) and Stop hooks arrays in ~/.claude/settings.json. This registration is a per-seat decision — the committed source lives in the repo; do not auto-wire it fleet-wide without an owner's call.

Tests

hooks/tests/test_budget_usage_lint.py (pytest) — RED fires, GREEN stays quiet, fail-open holds:

python3 -m pytest skills/golem-powers/budget-usage-lint/hooks/tests/ -v