An AI poller cost us almost 27 USD in one day: the 40-line spend guard we added
python
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One day in July our AI bill reached almost 27 USD in a single day. Nobody had asked for it. This post is the short version of what went wrong and the small guard we run so it does not happen silently again. The code is about 40 lines of Python with no extra packages. What happened We had an agent task that woke up every 3 minutes to check an inbox. Each wake-up was a full model call. The scheduler had registered that task 4 times, so it really ran about 80 times an hour. That alone