Uber blew its whole 2026 AI budget in four months.

Then it set a $1,500 monthly cap on each coding tool, per engineer. Claude Code, Cursor, a dashboard to watch the spend, an approval step to go over.

Simon Willison did the math. Two tools, and one engineer runs about $36,000 a year.

For years AI was a flat subscription. You paid once a month and you knew the number. Agentic coding turned that into a metered bill. And a metered bill does not warn you politely. It surprises you.

This is the cloud invoice all over again. A team turns something on, forgets it is metered, and finds out at the end of the month.

A paper this week put numbers on the risk. 63 real cases where agents blew past their limits. Often a single retry loop, quietly burning thousands before anyone looked.

A cap you cannot enforce in code is jus ...