- Essays··8 min read
The $500 Million Bill Nobody Anticipated: When AI Slop Debt Becomes a Balance-Sheet Problem
An enterprise client burned $500 million on AI services in a single month — a consequence not of reckless strategy, but of deferred governance. AI slop debt, the compounding cost of zombie agents, ungoverned prompts, and abandoned POCs that still bill, has crossed from engineering irritation to balance-sheet liability. When 73% of AI initiatives exceed budget, the board question is no longer which use cases to fund but who can turn off what is already running.
enterprise-aiai-governancefinopsai-agentsRead - Essays··11 min read
Uber Burned Its Entire 2026 AI Budget in Four Months — Here's the Bill Coming Due
Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April — not an overshoot, a full burn. Beneath that headline sits a three-layer debt stack: technical debt, ungoverned prompt sprawl, and cost overhang accrued during a subsidised-inference era now ending. Organisations that treat AI spend as an architectural concern from day one will survive what follows; those that audit costs only after the invoice arrives will not.
ai-cost-governanceenterprise-aifinopstechnical-debtRead - Essays··7 min read
The Slop Debt Bill Is Due, and Nobody on the Org Chart Owns It
Slop debt is the space between what you pay for AI and what you do not get. The bill is in the inbox; the question is whether the org chart catches up before the auditor does.
slop-debtfinopsagentic-aiai-governanceRead - Essays··8 min read
Cheap hits, confident wrong answers
Prefix caching is a fact; semantic caching is a bet. One is free and lossless, the other can return a confident, well-formatted, wrong answer with an HTTP 200. Both are true in the same architecture diagram.
llm-inferencesemantic-cachingfinopsprefix-cachingRead - Essays··8 min read
The bill nobody booked
The most expensive line item in your AI budget for the next two years is the one your finance team has not yet named. It is sitting in your environment already — half-built pilots, ghost fine-tunes, redundant copilots — capitalising itself into your monthly cloud invoice.
ai-slop-debtfinopsenterprise-aiai-governanceRead - Essays··8 min read
Why You're Paying Twice for the Same Token
Any 2026 production agent stack without the three-layer caching pattern — engine prefix cache, API prompt cache, gateway semantic cache — is carrying a 30–60% avoidable inference bill. The pattern isn't subtle; it's just rarely implemented in the right order.
inference economicscachingfinopsllmopsRead