Admission Control for Free-Tier Coding Agents: A Glossary, a Decision Tree, and Four Worked Leaves

Illustrative scenario, not a case study. You have a backlog of forty tasks and a hosted coding agent that runs on a free tier. Someone suggests sending the whole backlog through it over a weekend. Nothing in this post describes a real deployment, and none of the code below was executed — it is a harness you can adapt, drawn to show where the decision points are. The useful question is not "how many tokens do we have left?" It is "which tasks deserve to be sent at all?" A free allowance is a budget for experiments, and budgets are spent fastest on tasks you cannot check. Glossary: six terms worth fixing before you argue Term Working definition Why it changes the decision Reversal cost Work needed to undo the change: git revert, a data migration, a credential rotation, a customer email Anything above "revert a commit" disqualifies the task from unsupervised runs Verification latency Wall-clock time from "agent finished" to "a machine says pass/fail" If it exceeds