Winston

Winston is a B2B AI infrastructure product that acts as a Circuit Breaker for autonomous AI agents. It prevents runaway API costs caused by infinite loops, hallucinations, or misbehaving agents by sitting between the agent and its upstream LLM provider.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        Agent (e.g. Claude Code)                  │
└───────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                            │ LLM API calls
                            ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                     Winston Proxy  (proxy/)                      │
│                                                                   │
│  • Built with FastAPI + LiteLLM                                  │
│  • Intercepts every LLM request                                  │
│  • Tracks token / dollar spend per agent / org                   │
│  • Enforces budget limits — rejects requests that exceed them    │
│  • Routes approved requests to the real upstream provider        │
└───────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                            │ approved requests only
                            ▼
              ┌─────────────────────────────┐
              │  Upstream LLM Provider       │
              │  (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)   │
              └─────────────────────────────┘

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   Winston MCP Server  (mcp-server/)              │
│                                                                   │
│  • Implements the Model Context Protocol (MCP)                   │
│  • Exposes tools that agents can call directly                   │
│  • check_budget — lets an agent query its remaining budget       │
│    before issuing expensive operations                           │
│  • Future tools: pause_agent, report_loop, adjust_limit, …      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Components

Component	Stack	Purpose
proxy/	Python · FastAPI · LiteLLM	High-concurrency reverse proxy with budget enforcement
mcp-server/	TypeScript · @modelcontextprotocol/sdk	MCP server exposing budget/control tools to agents

Quick Start

Proxy

cd proxy
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn main:app --reload --port 8000

MCP Server

cd mcp-server
npm install
npm run build
npm start

How It Works

1. An agent is configured to route all LLM calls through the Winston Proxy instead of calling the provider directly.
2. The proxy checks the agent's remaining budget on every request. If the budget is exhausted, the request is rejected with a structured error.
3. Optionally, the agent can call the check_budget MCP tool before starting an expensive task to get a real-time budget snapshot.
4. Operators manage budgets, view spend analytics, and configure circuit-breaker thresholds through the Winston API.