Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call
Hacker News (score: 11)Description
Earlier this year we started seeing agent traffic in our logs and it looked like coding agents were calling our CLI. But that CLI wasn't designed with coding agents in mind. We went down a philosophical rabbit hole to see if a CLI is even needed anymore given that Claude, Copilot et al. already follow best practices. Ultimately we decided to create a new CLI from the ground up with coding agents in mind for two reasons:
1. We optimized the CLI for agent callers and cut Claude's output token usage by up to 79% and API cost by up to 67% versus a bare-Claude baseline. We wrote a blog documenting our lessons on optimizing user token usage when designing a CLI, e.g. using predicate flags so the agent doesn't compose jq | python | wc pipelines, output format that strips JSON's redundant field names. The blog is here: https://www.infracost.io/resources/blog/we-cut-claude-s-toke...
2. With cloud costs, precision matters. Telling a coding agent "make this Terraform cost-optimized" can be expensive and lossy. You burn tokens loading code and policy context into every conversation. Your agent could make up a price and you wouldn't know because it's difficult to verify that across the ~10M price points that AWS, Azure and Google have. The CLI runs static analysis on the code, uses the latest prices from cloud vendors, and passes that context to the coding agent.
So that's what we're launching today - Cost.dev: https://cost.dev/.
- It runs locally. Your code never leaves your machine, you get a fast feedback loop, and you're not burning API calls per character when you want to fetch prices.
- The CLI does the deterministic work. Fetching price points, scanning the code, validating fixes. The coding agent does the natural-language part. You don't have to trust the LLM to remember the rules, and can verify it called the right CLI command.
- It provides a consistent rule layer across every tool you use. Get cost estimates in your IDE and your coding agent with a single install. We support Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, as well as IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains
Before we keep building more in that direction, I want to sanity-check with HN: is "agents writing IaC in prod" actually a thing yet, or am I betting on a future that's still a year out? I know software developers are using coding agents heavily, but are platform/infra folks doing that for prod too? Also, if you have any feedback on Cost.dev, I'd love to hear it!
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Show HN: Computable – Buy, sell, and redeem GPU for the exact weeks you want
Show HN: Computable – Buy, sell, and redeem GPU for the exact weeks you want Hey we are Computable. We spent years building trading infrastructure at Jump Trading and Coinbase. From that point of view, compute looks like energy markets before 2000: everything trades through private bilateral leases, there’s no visible price, and nothing can be resold. The same H100 rents at a 2x spread depending on who’s asking, and once you sign a 24-month lease, it can never change hands.<p>So we built a market for GPU nodes, sold by the calendar week. Here are three things you can do on it that you can’t do anywhere else:<p>- Buy exactly the weeks you need. Three nodes for the last two weeks of October means you pay for those two weeks and walk away when the run is done. You don't have to commit to 6-24 months, and there's no flexibility premium.<p>- Sell back what you don’t use. If your plans change, unused weeks turn back into cash: we keep a market quote posted on every position, so there’s always a price to hit.<p>- Buy (or sell) the future. Lock January in July at a price you set, so the cost of a future run is known before another 40% H100 rate jump makes it not.<p>The first auction is live now at <a href="https://market.getcomputable.com">https://market.getcomputable.com</a>: a block of nodes, August through the end of January. Bidding closes July 31. The bids are sealed. You bid how many nodes, which weeks, and your price. Every clearing price gets published after settlement, because nobody knows what a GPU week is worth and we want the prints to exist in public.<p>Happy to go deep in the comments on anything, including the clearing mechanism, which is a packing problem and was fun to design!
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