An AI coding tool that runs all day needs a resource budget before it needs another autonomy demo.
A public Codex issue claims its SQLite feedback logs were the main continuous writer on a machine that wrote ~37 TB in 21 days, with TRACE logs making up ~70% of retained bytes.
The exact workload may be unusual, but the product lesson is hard to dodge.
Coding agents are becoming resident developer infrastructure. That makes boring limits trust features:
log caps
write budgets
retention policy
kill switches
privacy-safe traces
clear cleanup paths
If an agent can watch the repo, stream tool calls, store feedback, and run for hours, observability itself can become a production workload.
The next serious agent product review should include one question before the demo:
what does this thing do to my machine when I leave it running?