Budget.md

BUDGET.md is a workspace primitive that documents the financial constraints guiding a development project. It records budget envelopes, per-component cost ceilings, and, for open-source projects, a cost-mitigation strategy. The file is designed to be read by AI agents so they can weigh cost tradeoffs such as model selection, infrastructure choices, and paid API usage without the developer restating those limits in every session.

The project is delivered as a plain markdown file that follows a simple structure, keeping it readable by both humans and language models. It is part of the AI Dev Workspace Primitives index, a broader set of conventions for organizing context that AI coding assistants consume within a repository. Its scope is documentation and convention rather than executable code.

This primitive may be useful to developers who use AI coding agents on projects with limited or fixed budgets, and to those building personal or open-source tools where hosted model calls, cloud infrastructure, or third-party services carry real costs. It gives agents explicit financial boundaries to reason against, reducing the chance of recommending expensive options that conflict with the project's constraints.