The latest articles on DEV Community by Gabriele (@alzarucco). https://dev.to/alzarucco https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4051235%2Fc196fb08-93ed-4c13-b3e8-699ab736f433.jpg https://dev.to/alzarucco en Gabriele Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:36:39 +0000 https://dev.to/alzarucco/has-an-agent-ever-burned-your-budget-overnight-how-do-you-guard-against-it-567c https://dev.to/alzarucco/has-an-agent-ever-burned-your-budget-overnight-how-do-you-guard-against-it-567c <p>I've been building agents for a few months and the failure that scared me wasn't a crash, it was cost. An agent loops, every individual call looks fine, and you find out from the bill.</p> <p>So I built a proxy that sits in front of the agent and stops it. Budget cap that cuts mid-stream, but also: it notices when the agent is sending the identical prompt over and over and breaks the loop before the call goes out, and it drops tool calls you've blocked (like delete_*) before they reach your code.</p> <p>It's open source, runs locally, no signup: </p> <p><a href="https://github.com/gommapane1/SpendGuard" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/gommapane1/SpendGuard</a></p> <p>What I actually want to know: is this a real problem for you, or am I solving something I only had myself? And if you do guard against it, how?</p> ai opensource automation api