[anupsingh123]

Classic "I'll be right back" moment that cost me real money.

Building justcopy.ai - lets you clone, customize and ship any website. Built 7 AI agents to handle the dev workflow automatically.

Kicked them off to test something. Went to grab coffee.

Came back to a $100 spike on my OpenRouter bill. First thought: "holy shit we have users!"

We did not have users.

Added logging. The agent was still running. Making calls. Spending money. Just... going. Completely autonomous in the worst possible way. Final damage: $200.

The fix was embarrassingly simple: - Check for interrupts before every API call - Add hard budget limits per session - Set timeouts on literally everything - Log everything so you're not flying blind

Basically: autonomous ≠ unsupervised. These things will happily burn your money until you tell them to stop.

Has this happened to anyone else? What safety mechanisms are you using?

[magicalhippo]

I thought the hotel AI's playing poker together in Altered Carbon was a bit cheesy until these newfangled LLM-driven agents came along, and it all seemed a lot more realistic.

Agents doing nothing, just doing things for the sake of doing things.

Seems we're there.

[vorpalhex]

"Good job claude, go ahead and fire up some poker with your friends for a few hours. You've earned some downtime."

I am now going to make a multi-agent poker MCP as a joke. Thank you.

[fragmede]

Privacy.com credit card with a limit set, and making sure that billing is not set to auto on the LLM platform.

[anupsingh123]

How would that help with supervising agent runs for each user on justcopy.ai?

[fragmede]

Anthropic won't run your API calls if you're out of API credits (and on that plan) so if there's only $10 in the account, you run $10 worth of API calls, and then the calls fail instead of costing you money.

[W3schoolz]

What a great learning opportunity! Supervision is key and budget limits are highly valuable in preventing surprises.

That said, I think a budget limit of $5-10k per agent makes sense IMO. You're underpaying your agents and won't get principal engineer quality at those rates.

[SpaceNoodled]

My chief safety mechanism is not using money-burning slop generators.

[anupsingh123]

That's one approach. For me, the agent setup cut what used to be a full day of manual work down to minutes - even with the $200 learning tax, that's still a net win. But I get the skepticism.