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letscooktech-studioletscooktech-studio/outcomelab/skills/cost-explosion-detector/SKILL.md

cost-explosion-detector

Skill7 starsChanged 6 days agoMITView on GitHub

Detect and prevent cloud, SaaS, data, and AI cost escalation using billing, usage, architecture, and growth evidence. Use for FinOps reviews, budget variance, pricing changes, AI inference costs, or pre-scale cost design.

1 other project uses a version of this.

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The file

We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent

1 rule. About 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.

  • ≈0

    Common · estimate

    Many files like this have a rule of this kind.

  • ≈1

    Distinctive · estimate

    This author's own choices. Worth a look.

  • 0

    Very specific

    Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.

  • Common
  • Distinctive
  • Very specific
  1. Distinctive:

    Do not recommend changes that break SLOs without an explicit trade-off approval.

    line 27

≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 350,495 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.

Keep what fits and drop the rest. Your version, ready for your agents.
Files
SKILL.md

Cost Explosion Detector

Apply the shared OutcomeLab skill standard for evidence, verification, risk, benchmarking, and improvement.

Trace spend to its technical and commercial drivers, then install guardrails before the next bill does it for you.

Workflow

  1. Reconcile invoice, usage, tags, owners, environments, commits/releases, and business volume for the same time window.
  2. Decompose spend into fixed, variable, step-function, and waste categories. Model unit cost per customer, request, workload, or token.
  3. Detect high-growth drivers, idle or oversized resources, egress, retry storms, storage retention, pricing-plan drift, and uncapped AI loops.
  4. Rank interventions by savings confidence, risk, payback, engineering effort, and reversibility.
  5. Define budget alerts, quotas, anomaly thresholds, allocation tags, and a weekly ownership cadence.

Output contract

Return a spend baseline, driver tree, forecast with assumptions, prioritized savings register, implementation plan, and controls.

Quality gates

  • Separate realized savings from forecasts.
  • Do not recommend changes that break SLOs without an explicit trade-off approval.
  • Make every cost claim traceable to billing or usage evidence.

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