I Almost Went Broke Letting AI Agents Work for Me

try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3901965) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Ty Posted on Apr 28 I Almost Went Broke Letting AI Agents Work for Me #ai #opensource #agents #openclaw 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. I wanted something that could stop a dangerous agent run before the next provider call happens. So I built AgentCostFirewall. It is a local-first OpenAI-compatible proxy that sits between your AI agent and your model provider. Cursor / Continue / OpenClaw / local agent ↓ AgentCostFirewall ↓ OpenAI-compatible provider The idea is simple: detect risky or over-budget agent runs before they burn your API budget. Right now it supports: pre-call budget checks over-budget blocking basic runaway loop detection exact cache cache savings metrics local dashboard password auth streaming passthrough tool call passthrough no-key demo mode GitHub: https://github.com/z13661122409-hub/AgentCostFirewall I am looking for feedback from people using Cursor, Continue.dev, OpenClaw, Codex API-key mode, Cline, Roo Code, or custom local agents. Would you put something like this in front of your AI agent? Top comments (0) Subscribe Personal Trusted User Create template Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Submit Preview Dismiss Code of Conduct • Report abuse Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well Confirm For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse

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