*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.
People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.
I'm not sure a staging environment would have caught it.
I often find Claude makes changes that _look_ reasonable, but it's only when I really dig in (e.g. when refactoring) that I realise there's insidious problems.
I can imagine the author making the changes in a staging environment, seeing that it _appears_ to be ok, then blowing up production anyway.
A while back I think I heard you on a podcast describing these pain points. Experienced them myself; sounded like a compelling solution. I remember Dagger docs being all about AI a year or two ago, and frankly it put me off, but that seems to have gone again. Is your focus back to CI?
I agree it works well. Although as a long-time TDD practitioner it is mildly frustrating that it has taken LLMs to get more people to realise it works!
Thought it seemed like a great idea but I never tried it. In a startup it seemed like an unnecessary source of risk and in an enterprise too much hassle to convince stakeholders to switch from existing IaC products.
In my last company, we _did_ pay for Google Cloud support and when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports, the response was essentially "we are investigating", "we have identified the issue", and "please wait for it to be fixed". Hardly what I would call support. They couldn't care less.
The post is light on details. I'd guess the author ended up hammering the API and they decided it was abuse.
I expect more reports like this. LLM providers are already selling tokens at a loss. If everyone starts to use tmux or orchestrate multiple agents then their loss on each plan is going to get much larger.