358: AI Spend Limits Because Frontier Models Aren't Free Therapy

Welcome to episode 358 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan (who, rumour has it, was working on an Eagles music podcast) are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in AI and cloud news (and begging for a AI spend limit increase), including anthropic wanting everyone – except themselves – to slow down AI development, GitHub’s insane number of commits, and even an announcement from CoreWeave, plus so much more. Let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

Stop Configuring Domains One by One Like a Peasant SSH Into Your AI Agent Like It’s 1999 Your AWS Bill Finally Has an AI Babysitter Stop Blaming Engineering, the AI Will Do It Now GPU Queue Anxiety Meet Your Serverless Spark Therapist One Wildcard Certificate to Rule All Subdomains One PTU Reservation to Rule All Regions Twelve Billion Parameters Walk Into a Laptop Squeezing Gemma 4 Until the Bits Cry Azure Cobalt 200 VMs Are Really Arm-ed and Dangerous AI has gone all Fables and Myth Arm-ed she blows: but probably not to a region near you Dash to change your password as Dashlane gets owned Siri AI shows just how slow Gemini is AI Announces going public, and then spreads Myths about AI development

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GitHub’s scale challenge has grown substantially beyond earlier projections. The platform processed 1 billion commits in all of 2025, but now handles 1.4 billion commits per month, with AI agents alone generating over 17 million pull requests monthly. The technical remediation work has shifted from surface-level scaling to architectural rebuilding. GitHub has addressed MySQL contention, moved webhooks off MySQL entirely, rewritten the GitHub Actions job dispatch system, and is migrating performance-sensitive code from its Ruby monolith to Go. GitHub’s migration to Microsoft Azure, previously reported as a capacity move, is now described as a deeper infrastructure overhaul. The goal is service isolation so that a degraded subsystem like Actions does not cascade failures to Git or other core services. Microsoft is providing engineering support from teams with experience scaling systems at comparable load levels, which represents a more direct operational involvement than what was previously discussed. New feature releases like the Copilot CLI app are being developed outside the core GitHub.com infrastructure, which GitHub says allows continued product work without adding risk to the systems currently under remediation.

03:0 Ryan – “I’d actually lik...