I Almost Went Broke Letting AI Agents Work for Me

AI agents are powerful, but they can also be expensive in a very quiet way. When I use a normal chatbot, I send one message and get one answer. The cost is easy to understand. But when I let an AI coding agent work, it may read files, edit code, run tests, fail, retry, send more context, and call the model again and again. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it is just stuck in a loop. That made me think: most LLM dashboards only tell you how much money you spent after the money is already gone.