After CompSci

Introducing vibe checks. Helpful prompts to save your wallet while vibe coding by showing which external services you are using and how to enforce billing limits and alerts.

In any project you need to be mindful of your spend. This is true for code that you haven’t written completely by yourself, whether through vibe coding or a team. Otherwise we end up with unexpected bills like we’ve seen posted over the past few weeks. This is something you become familiar with once you have been programming for some time. But for the sake of the new folks this should lend a helping hand.

These are the first Vibe Checks we are implementing, more to come.

Vibe Check 1: Know your External Providers

Tell me if this project is making any requests to an external service. Provide the names of the service providers in a list.

This will give you a rough idea of which providers you are calling, once you have this run the following prompt to see how to setup billing and usage alerts for each provider. You can either run this setup yourself or pass it to the agents to run for you.

Vibe Check 2: How to add Budget Limits and Alerts

For the external providers in the above list do the following. 
1. List out how to set a budget limit for the resource.
2. Direct me on how to create an alert that notifies me when the billing threshold is almost reached and reached.

Run through the output of the above. If need be you either run this yourself or pass the commands to your agent of choice to run for you. For something like this it’s best to tinker with the alerts to ensure they are actually working.

Best of luck and I can’t wait to see what you build!