Cost discipline protocol for every Paperclip agent — check remaining budget before expensive operations, tier actions as cheap/moderate/expensive, switch to warning behavior at 80% of the monthly cap, hard-stop and report at 100%, and never work around a budget limit. Use before any costly operation, when asked "can I afford this", "check my budget", "how much have I spent", or whenever a budget warning or cap is hit. Don't use for deciding whether work is worth doing (ceo-operating-doctrine) or writing a ticket's budget field (delegation-protocol).
