We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, "after $X/month, send me a warning email", will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of…