You aren’t accounting for managerial politics. A product manager won’t gamble on a large project to lower operating cost, when their bonus is based on customer acquisition metrics.

The original author said he built this on the weekend, so my assumption is that this was something engineers had advocated for before but were shut down because management wanted them elsewhere.

The use of ai agents allowed them to shrink the problem down to the point where it was small enough to fit in their free time and not interrupt their assigned work.

A bit sarcastic, but still too close to reality for comfort:

For the managers, it's about a bonus. For engineers it's the existential question of future hirability: every future employer will love the candidate with experience in operating a $500k/a cluster. They guy who wrote a library that got linked into a service... Yeah, that's the kind they already have, not interested, move along.