todo: turn timer in chat, and a sub-agent spawn endpoint bounded by usage limits

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-21 05:44:47 +00:00
parent 6071ded175
commit a34ef422f4
6 changed files with 106 additions and 2 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+id: sub-agents/spawning-must-respect-the-account-s-own
+title: "Spawning must respect the account's own session and weekly limits"
+theme: sub-agents
+status: open
+created: 2026-08-21
+date_source: stated
+order: 2
+---
+
+**Spawning must respect the account's own session and weekly limits.** Wanted 2026-08-21, as a
+condition on the spawn endpoint rather than a later refinement. The failure it exists to prevent is
+specific: a sub-agent burns the last of a window, and the chat or session the owner is actually in dies
+mid-turn because the credits went somewhere nobody was watching.
+
+**The numbers are already read.** `api/chat/claude-usage.ts` fetches the limit windows from Anthropic's
+OAuth usage endpoint using the token the CLI stored at login, and exposes them as `UsageLimit` — a label
+already fit to render (`Session`, `Weekly`, `Fable Weekly`) with its percentage. So the backend does not
+need new plumbing to know how much room is left; it needs to consult what it has before starting work.
+
+Two facts from that file that shape this, both stated in its own header:
+
+- **The windows belong to the ANTHROPIC ACCOUNT, not to Officer.** They are spent by every `claude` on
+  the machine — this chat, a terminal, a task runner, a pipeline step. So a budget check has to reason
+  about a shared pool it does not control, and a reservation Officer makes for itself is a guess.
+- **The module is owner-only and structurally so.** It takes no identity at all, deliberately, because
+  `getOwnerHomeDir` ignores the email it is passed. Any budget rule that has to answer "how much has
+  THIS user left" needs something that does not exist yet.
+
+Open: what the endpoint does when the room is thin — refuse, queue until the window resets (the reset
+time is in the same payload), or downgrade the model; and whether the reserve is a fixed floor or a
+share the owner sets.