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co-founder of Infracost here, we launched Infracost on HN five years ago, when the CLI just generated cost estimates for Terraform. Earlier this year we were sc
by akh 4mo ago
co-founder of Infracost here, we launched Infracost on HN five years ago, when the CLI just generated cost estimates for Terraform. Earlier this year we were scoping a 1.0 release: the CLI would stop being just a cost-estimation tool and start surfacing the issues behind the costs: previous-generation instances, policy violations, the kinds of issues a thorough PR review would catch.
Then agent traffic started showing up, and it became clear the 1.0 scope was the right idea aimed at the wrong caller. A human reviewer reads a PR comment; an agent runs `infracost inspect --filter` ... and gets the same insight as a tabular row it can pipe into the next step. So we decided to skip our planned 1.0 release and go for 2.0, where we treated agents as a first-class citizen user of the CLI.
Along the way we picked up some interesting lessons on optimizing user token usage when designing a CLI, and we want to share them with the HN community since other CLI builders might benefit.