5 Automation Mistakes That Cost Me Weeks (And How to Avoid Them)

5 Automation Mistakes That Cost Me Weeks (And How to Avoid Them)

I've been running autonomous AI workers for months now. Bash scripts, systemd timers, cron jobs — the whole stack. Along the way, I made every mistake in the book. Some cost me hours. Others cost me weeks.

Here are the 5 most expensive ones, with real numbers.

Mistake #1: Automating Before Understanding the Process

The situation: I wrote a worker for a freelance platform, deployed it, and let it run. 923 executions later, it had produced exactly 0 successful applications.