2 min lesson
Cloud cost attribution systems
Answer "Why is enforcing tags in CI/CD fundamentally better than a quarterly tagging cleanup and what's the one thing CI enforcement still can't cover?" Use one lesson detail to support it.
Step 1 of 3
Cost at Cursor isn't a finance afterthought. The JD calls cost a first-order business problem, because a product serving 1M+ DAUs with GPU-heavy inference can burn money in places nobody's looking. The first job is making the spend legible.
An undifferentiated cloud bill is a number you can't act on. Attribution turns "we spent $1.2M last month" into "the agent inference service spent $640K, retrieval indexing spent $180K and a forgotten staging cluster spent $40K." The mechanism that makes this possible is boring and ruthless: every resource carries tags that say who owns it and why it exists.