We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
Coding agents make hard budget caps on cloud services urgently necessary by default
“Nobody wants to wake up to an email sent at midnight warning about a budget limit and find that, while they slept, their rogue service had consumed several hundred (or several thousand) more dollars of usage.”
Simon Willison argues that the rise of coding agents makes hard budget caps a critical default feature for cloud services, as autonomous code can rack up unexpected charges while users sleep. Both AWS and Google Cloud have recently launched spend cap features, suggesting the industry is responding to this need. The post highlights an emerging safety concern around agentic AI: financial runaway risk from AI-generated or AI-managed infrastructure.