The 2am AI bill: one infinite agent loop cost more than a year of office coffee
longtriproad · reddit · 2026-11-06
The author describes the "2am problem": a tool goes down, the agent doesn't know, so it retries in an infinite paid loop — potentially for six hours — until the provider's spend alert arrives, by which point the money is gone. One person reported a single bad night cost more than their office's yearly coffee budget.
The author built ACPPotamia, a proxy sitting between your agents and OpenAI/Anthropic: it checks each call's cost against a budget before it goes out and cuts off agents that are just repeating themselves. Setup is changing one URL in your existing SDK. The post also asks readers how their team first discovered runaway spend.
More from coding & agent
- Team livestreams open RL training of LoRA harness adapters for hermes, pi and opencode — yb2698 · 2026-11-06
- Workers IO launches to verify AI-written code with millions of fault-injected production simulations — julianweisser · 2026-11-06
- Law professor says Claude deleted a year of lecture notes at lunch — JeremyNguyenPhD · 2026-11-06
- 7 techniques for building cost-efficient AI pipelines, from model routing to cost-per-task — goyalshaliniuk · 2026-11-06
- Claude Code leaked users' emails via User-Agent header during web searches — NousResearch · 2026-11-06
- Harness-S rescues failed RL rollouts with sibling harnesses for generalizable agents — SJUT1 · 2026-11-06