The AWS Cleanup We Keep Putting Off (I Let an Agent Do It)

It started with a billing alert. Estimated charges had crossed $250. Not scary money, but enough to make me look. And what actually caught my attention wasn't the number, it was the alert itself. I'd clearly set this up at some point, and the threshold felt stale. So I went looking for where the alert lived. It came from a BillingAlerts CloudFormation stack I created back in 2014 and completely forgot about. So a thing I forgot about was warning me about all the other things I'd forgotten about. I opened my stack list and that's when I saw it wasn't alone. It was sitting in a lineup of stacks, and I didn't recognise half of them. Years of leftovers, just sitting there. The stuff you forget about doesn't break anything. It doesn't page you at 2am. It just sits there, quietly billing, until you glance at the invoice and can't remember what half of it is for. Forgotten, still-running resources are one of the biggest sources of wasted cloud spend, by some estimates around a quarter of the average cloud budget . I came to update one alert and I found a mess. To be clear, these stacks weren't really costing me much. Stopped instances, a few half-deleted leftovers. If they'd been the $252, the alert would've tripped every month. But that's the point. You can't tell what's actually costing you until the clutter is gone. So the alert could wait. I wanted these stale stacks gone first. Normally this is a chore. Open the console, find each stack, click delete, wait, refresh, check if it worked, OR write out CLI commands. It's not hard, just tedious. The kind of task I keep putting off. And that's exactly how this started. ClickOps through the console. I'd just finished deleting an old Directory Service directory over in the Mumbai region by hand, clicking through the screens and waiting out the spinner, when it hit me. Barely ten minutes of manual clicking, and I still had a pile of stacks to go. I didn't have to do any of this myself. Why was I still clicking? I opened Kiro ,