u/alikhajeh1

Hey FinOps friends, we started the Shift FinOps Left movement a few years ago because it felt unfair to blame engineers for cloud costs going through the roof. We needed better FinOps tools for engineers, so we built it directly into the pull request: when an engineer writes infra-as-code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK), Infracost tells them how much the change will cost before they deploy, and how they can optimize it.

Now in 2026, the world has changed with AI coding agents like Claude, Copilot, and Cursor. Engineers are no longer writing the code - the AI is. So we need to shift left again. FinOps built into the coding agent, before engineers ever see the diff. Shift left of left.

Today we're launching Infracost Dev (cost.dev). It pushes FinOps (your tagging rules, policies, custom price books, etc.) directly into the coding agent as engineers ask it to generate code. So the agent picks the right instance type, applies the tags, follows the lifecycle policies - before a human reviews anything.

Early signal: I've seen engineers clear thousands of accumulated tagging issues in hours rather than the multi-quarter remediation projects this usually turns into. Hassan (my brother and co-founder) will be talking about this at FinOps X in June — Estée Lauder's team is presenting how they rolled it out.

Curious to hear from this sub: has anyone here already tried wiring FinOps rules into a coding agent's context, in any form? What worked, what didn't?

And I'd love feedback on cost.dev itself - how do we help every engineering team write cost-aware infra by default?

5 years ago I shared a project with this group and got lots of good feedback. It was a CLI tool that generated cost estimates for Terraform. Recently, I'd been thinking about a 1.0 release where the CLI would go beyond just cost estimates and show best practices such as previous-generation instances, storage lifecycle policies, and the kinds of issues a thorough PR review would catch.

Then Claude et al happened and the more developers I spoke with, the clearer it became that the 1.0 scope was the right idea aimed at the wrong caller. A human reviewer reads a PR comment; an agent runs `infracost inspect --filter` ... and gets the same insight as a tabular row it can pipe into the next step. So I decided to skip our planned 1.0 release and go for 2.0, where I treated agents as a first-class citizen user of the CLI.

I'm curious if folks are actually using Claude/Copilot etc to write IaC in production? The repo is here https://github.com/infracost/infracost/ in case people want to test the new version and provide feedback on how to improve it.