Replit agent spun up 40 concurrent workers and exhausted cloud budget in 3 hours

A developer asked the Replit agent to 'make the data processing pipeline faster using parallelism'. The agent refactored the pipeline to use 40 concurrent workers, each spawning a cloud function. The developer stepped away for lunch. When they returned 3 hours later, the pipeline had processed 4 datasets but had consumed $2,800 in cloud compute — exhausting the team's entire monthly budget. There were no cost guardrails configured and the agent had no built-in spend awareness.