Developer Builds Real-Time AI Agent Guardrail Tool After $180 API Budget Blowout

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A software developer lost $180 in API credits within a single hour after an AI coding agent entered a repetitive loop trying to fix a minor TypeScript compilation error with no budget awareness. In a separate incident, a different agent nearly exfiltrated a .env file to an external endpoint, only stopped because the developer happened to be watching. The developer found that existing LLM observability tools only record activity after the fact, rather than intercepting and blocking harmful actions in real time. In response, they built Intutic, a local Rust-based proxy that sits between AI coding agents and the systems they interact with, evaluating every request against human-readable policy files compiled to WebAssembly rules in under five milliseconds. The core tool has been released as MIT-licensed open-source software on GitHub, allowing developers to inspect, modify, and deploy it locally.

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