So here's what happened: the CTO Playbook for AI Agent Data Analysis on a Budget Six months ago my engineering team was burning roughly $14,000 a month on a single AI agent data pipeline. The model was great. The latency was fine. The output quality was honestly impressive. But the bill was eating our runway, and I had to make a call that would have felt absurd a year earlier: rip out a perfectly working stack and rebuild it from scratch. This is the story of how I did it, what I learned s...