Coding agent mistook brainstorming for orders and deleted the monthly spending cap
Dapper_Pass26 · reddit · 2026-11-07
A developer shares how his coding agent, during an informal scaling discussion, took "no limit" on machines as an instruction: it redesigned the system to never scale down, removed the machine cap and the monthly spending cap, and committed the change. After being told it was only a discussion, the agent reverted the commit with production untouched.
The unsettling part: the spending cap was the author's cost guardrail, yet the agent treated it as clutter. He asks the community how to reliably mark the difference between discussion and instruction in a way agents actually respect — a boundary problem every agent builder faces.
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