My agents burned $71.40 in four hours and not one of them threw an error.
03:41:07, the publish step started retrying a job that had already gone through. it went into the log and nothing escalated it. no exception, no alert, dashboard stayed green. i found it at 07:53 because the api bill looked wrong.
the root cause was boring. https://t.co/g8pzVqdebY() got an empty string from the step before it, treated that as valid, returned ok. every agent downstream did the same thing. 2,847 calls, all successful, all garbage. 38 posts shipped with no caption.
i tried fixing it with a better prompt first. it changed nothing.
what actually fixed it is one line. every handoff now raises on empty input instead of passing it along. i replayed the last 30 runs against that rule and 3 of them would have been caught.
my job in all of this was clicking approve on the patch. that is genuinely the whole job.
agents do not crash. they keep going, confidently, on nothing. a green dashboard is not the same as working.
what does your setup do when one step returns nothing
I FIRED MY ENTIRE SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM. 6 AI AGENTS DO MORE WORK THAN ALL OF THEM COMBINED.
runs out of one dashboard, costs me under $60 a month, six agents seated at the desk, i check it from my phone with coffee at 7am.
a junior social team at an agency runs $4,000 to $8,000 a month for the same headcount. mine is six lines in a budget spreadsheet.
HOOK writes the opener β SCRIPT drafts it β CLIP cuts it and reformats for 9:16 β CAPTION writes the text β POST ships it to X, TikTok, IG Reels and YT Shorts β ANALYTICS reads what worked and rewrites what flopped.
14 posts yesterday. 3 of them flopped under 500 views, nobody hid that number from me.
my job is picking the thumbnail and hitting publish. that's the whole job now.
an agency used to mean a retainer, three meetings a week and a slow monthly report. mine posts 14 times a day and reports back before i finish my coffee. video below.