The bug that cost $200 This week, a GitHub issue titled HERMES.md went viral on Hacker News: an Anthropic billing bug silently charged a developer $200 extra — and Anthropic initially refused a refund. The thread now has 289 comments and 737 upvotes. Most of them are developers sharing their own billing anxiety stories. Here's a sample of what people are saying: "I disabled my Claude Code usage because I was terrified of runaway charges." "Metered billing for AI tools is the new dark pattern." "I now check my Anthropic dashboard more than I check my bank account." This is not a bug story. This is a structural problem with how AI is billed. The metered billing trap Every major AI provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini — bills by the token.…