gemini

How a Self-Referential Field Cost $26 in Two Hours of Autonomous Gameplay

Autonomous agents on metered LLM APIs can burn real money if their prompts grow without anyone watching. My two-hour OSRS-bot session billed $26 because one Python field was both read and overwritten in the same operation; the user message grew to 82,000 chars before I noticed. Token tracking returned zero the whole time, so the cost stayed invisible until the invoice arrived.