Heartbeat Governor

What it does

Cron skills run autonomously. A skill with a bug — an infinite retry, an unexpectedly large context, a model call inside a loop — can silently consume hundreds of dollars before you notice.

Heartbeat Governor tracks cumulative execution cost and wall-clock time per scheduled skill on a rolling 30-day basis. When a skill exceeds its budget, the governor pauses it and sends an alert. The skill won't fire again until you explicitly review and resume it.

It runs every hour to catch budget overruns within one cron cycle.

When to invoke

• Automatically, every hour (cron)
• Manually after noticing an unexpected API bill spike
• When a cron skill has been running unusually long

Budget types

Budget type	Default	Configurable
max_usd_monthly	$5.00	Yes, per skill
max_usd_per_run	$0.50	Yes, per skill
max_wall_minutes	30	Yes, per skill
max_runs_daily	48	Yes, per skill

Actions on budget breach

Breach type	Action
monthly_usd exceeded	Pause skill, log breach, alert
per_run_usd exceeded	Abort current run, log breach
wall_clock exceeded	Abort current run, log breach
daily_runs exceeded	Skip remaining runs today, log

How to use

python3 governor.py --status               # Show all skills and budget utilisation
python3 governor.py --record <skill> --usd 0.12 --minutes 4   # Record a run
python3 governor.py --pause <skill>        # Manually pause a skill
python3 governor.py --resume <skill>       # Resume a paused skill after review
python3 governor.py --set-budget <skill> --monthly 10.00       # Override budget
python3 governor.py --check                # Run hourly check (called by cron)
python3 governor.py --report               # Full monthly spend report
python3 governor.py --format json

Cron wakeup behaviour

Every hour the governor runs --check:

1. Load all skill ledgers from state
2. For each skill with paused: false:
   • If 30-day rolling spend exceeds max_usd_monthly → paused: true, log
   • If runs today exceed max_runs_daily → skip, log
3. Print summary of paused skills and budget utilisation
4. Save updated state

Procedure

Step 1 — Set sensible budgets

After installing any new cron skill, set its monthly budget:

python3 governor.py --set-budget daily-review --monthly 2.00
python3 governor.py --set-budget morning-briefing --monthly 3.00

Defaults are conservative ($5/month) but explicit is better.

Step 2 — Monitor utilisation

python3 governor.py --status

Review the utilisation column. Any skill above 80% monthly budget warrants investigation.

Step 3 — Respond to pause alerts

When the governor pauses a skill, investigate why it's over budget:

• Was there a one-time expensive run (large context)?
• Is there a bug causing repeated expensive calls?
• Does the budget simply need to be raised?

Resume after investigating:

python3 governor.py --resume <skill>

State

Per-skill ledgers and pause flags stored in ~/.openclaw/skill-state/heartbeat-governor/state.yaml.

Fields: skill_ledgers map, paused_skills list, breach_log, monthly_summary.