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"lessons learned" (lemmy.ml)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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screenshot of followup to the first tweet, also by @BenjaminDEKR: " Made some adjustments based on lessons learned. Combined: roughly 200-400x cheaper heartbeat operation."

https://xcancel.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/2017660150463582282

via this bluesky post:

screenshot of bluesky post by @rusty.todayintabs.com with text "I’m starting to think the people who are excited about “AI agents” have literally never used a computer in their lives" and screenshots of the above tweets

screenshot of tweet by @BenjaminDEKR with text: OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren't careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $0. Opus was checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The "Heartbeat" cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, ("remind me tomorrow to get milk") 1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT .md, thought about reminders 3. Replied "HEARTBEAT_OK" 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage: - Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats - 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone - Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." The problem is: 1. Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check 2. Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time 3. Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That's $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.
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[–] 5 points 9 months ago

Doubt he used the term cron job correctly. He didn’t setup up an actual cronjob and even if he did he probably let the LLM set it up for him.

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