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How a One-Hour Intro Call Saved a Client $17,000: When AI-Generated Code Meets Human Expertise
The Unexpected Outreach
About a month ago, I received a LinkedIn message from one of my connections. They were looking for someone with DevOps expertise who could help investigate and fix an urgent problem in their AI-built product.
Undefined users making excessive API requests.
As a true engineer at heart, always eager to dive into anything interesting and challenging, I enjoy tackling interesting technical challenges across all product layers — from design and development to management and operations. While I wasn’t actively seeking new projects, I’m always ready to jump in when an intriguing problem arises.
Would you be available for a security audit and some troubleshooting?
We’ve built our product primarily using AI coding assistants, and something’s not working right with our rate limiting.
I agreed to an introductory call, not realizing it would transform into a real-time problem-solving session exposing a critical flaw in their AI-generated codebase.
From Intro Call to Incident Response
The first 10 minutes followed the expected format of an introductory discussion. My interlocutor explained their company’s situation while I shared my background in architecture, cloud infrastructure, security practices, and development.
However, the conversation quickly shifted when they started sharing specific challenges they were facing.
We’re seeing strange patterns in our OpenAI API usage that don’t match our user base.
Our costs have skyrocketed to over $17,000 in just three months since launch. We built most of this product with AI coding tools, and the infrastructure seems solid, but something’s clearly wrong.
We were now diving into a real-world issue that needed immediate attention — one that highlighted the limitations of relying too heavily on AI for security-critical systems.
The Technical Deep Dive
My interlocutor shared their screen, walking me through their application and infrastructure. Their product was a content…
