We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

AI coding agents and personal agents make it easier to spin up code that can incur unexpected costs through paid APIs and hosted services, creating a risk of massive surprise bills if services run unchecked. The solution is for cloud providers and pay-by-usage services to offer default hard budget caps that automatically stop services and return errors when limits are exceeded, rather than soft caps that merely send warnings. AWS and Google Cloud have recently begun rolling out such spending limit features, addressing justified concerns from users who avoid these platforms due to fears of financial catastrophe from runaway services.