Token Budget Management

Token budgets are an incident source: “why did it miss that doc?” is often “it got dropped.”

Fabra treats budgeting as part of production state and records it.

Priorities + required items

Build contexts from ContextItems with:

• priority (what drops first)
• required=True/False (required items must remain)

Dropped-item receipts

When budgets force drops, Fabra records:

• which items were dropped
• why they were dropped

That’s why context_id is a receipt, not a log line.

Debugging budget drift

Use diffs to see when the budget changed what made it into the final context:

fabra context diff <id1> <id2>

Next reading

• Context Assembly
• Blog: Token Budget Management (/blog/token-budget-management/)