Recall Latency Budget

Recall Latency Budget treats the time an agent spends re-establishing context as a line item you can measure and cap, not an invisible tax. Every session that starts cold forces the agent to re-read brand guidelines, re-derive architectural decisions, or re-ask a client's tone rules, and each of those steps burns tokens, wall-clock time, and human review hours. The budget is the acceptable ceiling on that re-establishment cost per workflow. Recognition-first systems such as Bourdon push recall toward near zero by federating memory across Claude, Codex, and Cursor, while retrieval-based layers such as Knownbase and Cogni trade a small lookup step for structured, queryable archives. For agencies running retainers, the budget compounds: a 20-minute re-brief across 40 monthly agent runs is roughly 13 hours of billable capacity. Set the ceiling before you scale agent count, because a memory layer that adds latency per hop quietly erodes the margin you automated to protect.