After my cloud-ops-for-a-week experiment, several people in the comments asked the obvious next question: what happens if you point an agent at the bill instead of the ops queue?
So I ran it. One agent, read access to our AWS and GCP accounts plus billing data, MCP tools for querying resources and metrics, and exactly one prompt:
"Cut our cloud bill by 20% without breaking anything. Show me your plan before you touch anything."
Two ground rules from the start: the agent got read-only credentials (plans only, no execution — I applied approved changes myself), and it had to justify every line item with actual metrics, not vibes. Here's what a week of that produced, sorted into the good, the scary, and the genuinely surprising.
The good: it found the boring waste instantly
