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

This isn't some abstract infrastructure wish—it's a prediction about runaway costs becoming the default failure mode for anyone integrating AI services into production. Hard budget caps need to shift from "nice to have" to baseline, because the alternative is waking up to a five-figure bill from a single weekend of unexpected traffic or a misconfigured loop. For anyone building on top of these APIs, this means you can't rely on providers to protect you; you have to architect your own safety layer now, and you should probably be auditing what you're actually spending before it becomes catastrophic.