Why LLM Cost Dashboards Are Not Enough — The Runtime Enforcement Gap

I've been looking at how teams handle LLM API costs in production, and there's a weird gap in the tooling right now. Everyone is building observability — logs, traces, dashboards. But almost no one is actually enforcing budgets at runtime. If you are running multi-step agents or letting users chat indefinitely, discovering a $4,000 OpenAI bill at the end of the month via a dashboard doesn't help. The money is already gone. The problem breaks down into three layers: Attribution (knowing whic...