Automation: a cautionary tale.

I knew I was getting a little gung ho with Claude Cowork and dispatch. But as it was a Saturday and I was spending time with my kids and mostly on the go I thought I’d set it off on a little bit of R&D for me. Basically I just wanted it to refine a prompt to then create a game in Lovable for me to test out its capabilities to just go and grab sprites from a library for

Me (and for it to choose the library, choose the sprites and implement the animations in the game). And for it to do that while I hung out with my kids doing dad stuff. As I already had success with getting it to limit the amount of credits it would spend on a lovable project if I put a cap on it I was pretty sure I could leave it to it. It went wrong in two ways. Firstly it abandoned the ormot creation it was working in with chatGPT as it recalled a previous request to limit chats with chatGPT (for a different request) to 3 back and forths. Because I didn’t want to spend time on my phone I just picked the first sprite game I thought of for it to clone as a starting point (just to see how it handled sprites), which was Rodland. While it did keep to the credit cap the prompt it gave was pretty much “clone Rodland” even though it had a beautiful prompt waiting. Much BIGGER ISSUE though was it had some issue where it thought the prompt wasn’t working an so kept creating a new project. Good job i happened to catch it when it had only got up to the sixth absolutely terrible Rodland clone. Still I proved it could bring sprites in pretty easily lol. I was lazy and I got lazy back and thankfully stopped it before it rampaged through a months worth of lovable credits. Costly still, but not horrific. See its explanation below:

“All 5 running sessions have been sent stop signals and won’t take any further actions. I’m really sorry — what happened is that every time the start_task tool timed out, it actually DID create a session in the background without me knowing, so they all piled up and started working independently.

That was a serious mistake on my part. I should have checked for running sessions before retrying instead of assuming the timeouts meant failure.

Nothing more will happen until you tell me to proceed.”

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