derive-budget-is-efficient-and-floor-bounded
IN derived (depth 1)
The derive pipeline's per-agent budget allocation is both computationally efficient (O(N) linear accumulation, not quadratic) and representation-safe (each agent and local group guaranteed at least 5 belief slots), ensuring proportional allocation never starves minority agents.
Summary
The system that generates new insights distributes its attention across agents fairly and cheaply — it counts up each agent's contributions in a single pass rather than redundantly, and no agent gets squeezed out because every group is guaranteed a minimum number of slots even if its share of the total is tiny.
Justifications
SL — Linear counting ensures scalability while floor guarantees ensure minimum representation — together they make budget allocation both performant and fair
Antecedents (all must be IN):
- derive-budget-count-is-linear — Agent belief counting in `_build_beliefs_section` accumulates as N (number of beliefs shown per agent), not N² — the corrected behavior after the issue #23 fix where `count += len(belief_ids)` was moved outside the per-belief loop
- derive-budget-floor-five — Each agent group and the non-agent group are guaranteed at least 5 belief slots in the prompt regardless of proportional budget allocation.
Dependents
These beliefs depend on this one:
- budget-enforcement-is-efficient-across-pipeline — All budget-constrained operations — compact output distillation and derive belief allocation — achieve computationally efficient tracking with representation-safe minimum bounds, ensuring budget enforcement never becomes a performance bottleneck.
- derive-budget-is-flexible-and-efficient — The derive pipeline's budget allocation is both strategically flexible (three selection strategies: alphabetical truncation, random sampling, semantic clustering) and computationally efficient (linear accumulation with guaranteed floor of 5 per agent group), enabling callers to trade off reproducibility, diversity, and semantic coherence without performance penalty.
- derive-pipeline-is-safe-complete-and-efficient — The derive pipeline simultaneously achieves safety (fail-soft validation with Jaccard retraction guards and environment isolation), completeness (exhaustive exploration with guaranteed termination via cycle guards), and efficiency (linear O(N) budget accumulation with a floor of 5 beliefs per agent preventing representation starvation).