Ai

Two bills, two different shapes A hosting bill is capacity. You add CPU, bandwidth or storage, and the meter follows the traffic curve. Once you have seen a month, you can predict the next one within a few percent. A token bill is behaviour. Two teams with identical traffic can differ by 20× because one sends 12,000 tokens of retrieved context per request and the other caches a 400-token system prompt and sends nothing else. Same users, same features, wildly different invoices. ...

The failure is social before it is technical The pattern repeats across teams. Someone turns on an agent, watches it work, and then one day the read-only dropdown is gone, or the agent keeps editing while they are still reviewing the first diff. An hour later the branch has forty changed files, half of them unrelated, and nobody can say why src/legacy/ was touched. The complaint that follows is always the same shape: I no longer know this code, or how it works. ...

The failure mode nobody notices in time Ask an assistant to summarise a CI pipeline and you get a tidy paragraph: the lint stage took 42 seconds, the build 3.5 minutes, the whole pipeline 16.4 minutes, 18% faster than last week. It reads like a report. Two hours later someone notices the build job never took 3.5 minutes, and the failure rate was copied from a different week. Nothing about the paragraph looked suspicious. That is the entire problem: a fabricated number and a real number are typographically identical. ...