In 2019, I made a mistake.

I caught it within minutes. I fixed it. I went to work the next morning convinced the problem was over.

By Friday evening, my personal AWS account had accumulated a huge $750 bill. My heart sank.

For years, it was an embarrassing story - one that taught me lessons I've since passed on to every engineer I've worked with & mentored. A real war story.

Then AI agents arrived.

Today, we're inviting autonomous agents into our terminals, repositories and cloud environments. We're giving them access to our code, our infrastructure and, in many cases, our most valuable secrets. We're trusting them to make decisions at a speed and scale that humans simply can't.

What could possibly go wrong?

This talk tells the story of one small mistake that changed the way I think about software engineering forever - and why I believe you could be the next victim.

The technology has changed. The underlying risks haven't.

If we're not careful, my $750 AWS mistake will look cheap.
...and you might be the one footing the bill.

Come for the story. Leave with the tools and knowledge to make sure that history doesn't repeat itself.