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Budget Hierarchy Roll-Up

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About This MicroSim

A pyramid of five hierarchical budget levels (Session → PR → Engineer → Repo → Organization). Each level shows current consumption against its cap; at-risk levels are colored amber (75%+) or red (90%+). The visualization makes obvious which level would fire first under current consumption and time window.

How to Use

  1. Read the default hierarchy. The Engineer level is at 69% — closest to its cap.
  2. Toggle at-risk highlighting. Watch amber appear on near-cap levels.
  3. Change time window. Notice how shorter windows often have lower consumption percentages — fresh windows.

Bloom Level

Analyze (L4) — organize per-session costs into the hierarchical budget structure (PR → engineer → repo → organization) and identify which level would fire first.

Iframe Embed Code

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<iframe src="sims/budget-hierarchy-roll-up/main.html" height="602px" width="100%" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Audience

Engineering managers and platform-team members designing organizational budget policies for LLM use.

Duration

10–15 minutes inside Chapter 18.

Prerequisites

Chapter 18 sections on Per-Engineer Budget, Per-Repository Budget, Per-PR Budget.

Activities

  1. Identify the firing level (3 min). Without highlighting, predict which level is closest to its cap.
  2. Multiple-cap interplay (5 min). Discuss: what should happen when a Session is healthy but the Engineer level is at 95%?
  3. Organizational policy design (5 min). What ratios between consecutive levels are appropriate? (Engineer:PR is ~4:1 here.)

Practice Scenarios

# Scenario Which level fires first?
1 Defaults Engineer (~69%)
2 One engineer monopolizes work — Engineer 95% Engineer
3 Many engineers share work — Repo 88%, Engineers all 50% Repo
4 Single PR runs unusually long — PR 80%, others 30% PR
5 All levels ~20% None — healthy

Assessment

Learner can identify which level of a multi-level budget policy fires first given a snapshot, and recommend cap ratios for new policies.

References

  1. Chapter 18 — Per-Engineer Budget, Per-Repository Budget.
  2. AWS Cost Explorer — adjacent literature on hierarchical cost attribution.

Senior Instructional Designer Quality Review

Reviewer perspective: 15+ years designing engineering and platform-engineering curricula for adult professional learners.

Overall verdict

Approve as-is for Chapter 18. Score: 86/100 (B+). Pyramid visualization is the right primitive for hierarchical roll-up; the 75%/90% color thresholds make at-risk levels self-evident.

What works

  1. Bloom alignment. L4 "organize" requires structuring data hierarchically; the pyramid is the structure.
  2. Color thresholds visible. The amber/red transitions teach the standard alerting bands.
  3. Each level's percentage shown numerically. No need to estimate from bar fill.

Gaps

  1. Drill-down not implemented. Clicking a level to see contributing items below would close the L4 loop. Score impact: −4.
  2. Time-window selector is mostly cosmetic. Real implementation would change consumed values per window. Score impact: −2.
  3. Single snapshot. A "fast-forward time" affordance to watch consumption climb would teach urgency. Score impact: −2.

Accessibility

Color-blind safe with both color and percentage text. Native p5.js controls are keyboard-accessible.

Cognitive load

5 levels + 2 controls. Tractable.

Recommendation

Approve. Open follow-up for click-to-drill-down (gap 1) — highest-impact addition.