Farzam

A customer offers to pay for a feature. The money would help, but the feature only fits their workflow.

Saying yes could fund the next few months. It could also leave you maintaining a second product inside the first one.

After enough "can I run the tests?" prompts, "can I send this to your customer?" risks becoming another button to clear.

Five months ago I asked here how people keep track of their agents. The replies went well beyond coding. In a later discussion, a builder running customer support agents made a point that stuck: people stop reviewing when checking the draft takes longer than writing the reply themselves.

One thing I've been thinking about while building tooling for AI agents is that a budget and a cost estimate solve two very different problems.

A budget tells you what you're willing to spend. A prediction tells you what a task is likely to cost. Neither guarantees that the task will finish within that amount.