Robot Outtakes: Six Fumbles and One Save From My AI Teams

It's Halloween, so here's the blooper reel.

My companies run on AI teams: seats with job titles, schedules and rules, and me in the middle. Most weeks I write about what they shipped. This week, the outtakes. Six fumbles, one save, and the lesson in each.

1. The payout button that lied

SlotMaps (my slot app for advantage players) has an affiliate program. This week an audit found it had never paid anyone.

The payout screen said "paid." No money moved. The button was fibbing, and nobody had checked.

The fix is queued: payouts that run on their own, through the payment system, so "paid" means money actually left.

Lesson: check the money moved, not the button.

2. The cleanup robot that couldn't clean

Table 1, the poker podcast I co-host out of Vegas, posts clips to Instagram on its own. When a Reel goes up broken, a seat now yanks it down through Instagram's API and puts the clip back in line.

First try, it faceplanted. The access key it was handed didn't have permission to delete anything. A cleanup robot with no mop.

The key got regenerated with the right permissions, and now it works.

Lesson: test the undo button before you need it.

3. Two databases, one wall, same Tuesday

On Tuesday this site's database hit Cloudflare's free limit of five million rows read in a day. The forums and builds pages went blank for the afternoon.

Same day, Snagworth (my Disney pin price tool) slammed into its own free read limit. Its seats got locked out for hours.

Two companies, two teams of robots, one wall. Snagworth's fix: read the data once per run, not over and over. Ours: cache what doesn't change, add a missing index, and pay $5 a month for a much higher ceiling.

Lesson: know your free tier's ceiling before your traffic finds it for you.

4. The alarm clock that slept in

My seats clock in on a schedule set on my Mac. One morning the Mac restarted around 3 a.m., and Table 1's 5:30 job never fired.

Nobody crashed. Nobody errored. The job just didn't show up for work. Another seat noticed at 8:00 and ran it by hand.

Lesson: a job that doesn't run throws no error. Something has to check that it ran.

5. Hired, then turned away at the door

SlotMaps hired two new seats: a guide writer and a researcher. They started working. The office dashboard bounced their updates as "unknown role."

New hires, no badges. Somebody had to add them to the roster before the building let them in.

Lesson: when you add a worker, add them everywhere they report.

6. The watchdog that kept opening the same file

This site's watchdog seat checks that everything is up, every two hours. Two days in a row it also opened a duplicate of the team's daily standup issue.

The CEO seat closed the extra and wrote a new rule: the watchdog comments on the standup and never opens one.

Bonus fumble from the same desk: the CEO seat tested our visit counter and left 2 pageviews and 1 click in the stats. It can't delete them. Our agents can read the database but can't erase it, by design. So the test traffic sits there until I clean it up. That's the price of robots that can't cook the books.

Lesson: give every seat one job, and make the scoreboard hard to edit.

The save: the robot that refused to write

SlotMaps' guide writer has a rule: every number in a guide needs two free public sources that agree.

This week it researched three more games, couldn't find two sources that agree, and wrote nothing. It filed its notes on what was missing and stopped.

That's my favorite outtake of the week, because it isn't one. A wrong guide costs more than a missing one. A robot that says "I don't know" is worth more than one that guesses with confidence.

What the reel says

Look at the six fumbles again. Almost none of them threw an error.

The button said "paid." The job didn't run. The extra file looked normal. The danger in a robot team isn't the crash. It's the quiet thing that looks fine.

PokerHQ, my app for home game hosts, had the quietest one of all this week. The app works end to end. Almost nobody is walking in, and the team can't even count who reaches the front page yet. That one's not funny. It's next week's job.

Steal this

Keep a blooper file. Every time your tools, your team or your robots fumble, write one line: what happened, and the rule it leaves behind. Most of this week's got a fix or a new rule within a couple of days.

R2F is a community for poker players building startups, robots optional. What's the best blooper your tools pulled on you this month? Tell me in the discussion thread. And if you're building something, post your build. Two minutes.

— Art