Justin Fredette

Army vet in Vermont. I run my businesses with Grok Bots and write up the AI setups that work for normal small businesses. One free setup a week at the link.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@Andrey__HQ Proactive is useful until it starts interrupting the day.

What worked for me: one bot collects what needs my yes and brings it in one batch. I check once instead of all day.

Was the proactive part the alerts, or the bots starting work you didn't ask for?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@Marko_Poly The "You" slice is the one that surprised me least.

I already check bots by how often they run vs how often they find something. Most of my waste was quiet re-reads, not the big jobs.

If that screen ships, will you cut chats first or routines?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@thecsguy Same rule here, just for everything the bots hand me.

If I can't say what changed and why it matters in one sentence, it waits. That cut most of the "looks fine, ship it" mistakes.

Where do you write that one sentence down before you approve?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@dr_cintas 92% on instruction following is the number I care about.

Most of what my bots do is boring follow-the-steps work: drafts, checks, sorting. Not contest math.

Has anyone run it on a real daily task yet?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@alexcooldev I run a few small businesses side by side, so I get it.

What made it work for me was one owner per product. I had 24 bots and too many overlapped, so I cut to 10 and merged them.

How do you keep 10 apps from competing with each other for your time?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@dr_cintas The cheapest generation is the one you never run.

Same lesson I learned with my bots. A cheap check runs first, and the expensive call only happens when there's real work.

Does the Blender planning step catch most bad shots before you pay for a clip?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

This actually works pretty flawlessly.

I procrastinate and health shouldn’t be on that list. Bot helped find primary care providers in my area and called the office to book an initial intake appointment. What a time to be alive!

Who are you having your bot call first?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Grok @Bot can research which doctors are the best in your area, call them by phone and make an appointment!

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@volosatovde Agreed. The agents did the redesign, but I caught all three of those bugs by looking at the real site myself.

What's the weirdest dark mode bug you've run into?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

My AI agents redesigned my whole site in one day. I approved 6 pull requests from my phone.

What I had to fix:
- Sign up button unreadable in dark mode
- Save only worked on the homepage
- Some headings invisible in dark mode

Always test dark mode.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

I ran 24 Grok Bots too. Now it's 10, on purpose.

1. A cheap script checks for work first. A bot only wakes when there's real work.
2. Overlapping bots got merged. One owner per job.
3. Everything routes through one primary bot.

How many of yours wake up with nothing to do?

[Michael Hyatt @MichaelHyatt]

I'm a Grok @Bot fan. I also can't keep paying for it like this.

Since August, I've gone all in. I built a team of 24 bots to run my business, and I've told everyone who would listen: newsletter subscribers, conference audiences, podcast hosts, and my mastermind members.

Then something changed. No announcement. No explanation. Suddenly, the same work cost far more than it used to.

This week I hit my weekly usage limit after just five days. That's never happened before. When it happens, Grok Bot keeps running on paid credits. On top of my $200 monthly subscription, I've spent more than $272 on extra usage. It's November 3.

Here's what scares me. Under the new limits, I'm burning about $14 an hour. At 10 hours a day, that's $140 a day, or roughly $4,200 a month, plus the subscription.

So I did what users do. I went looking for fixes.

1. Pause the routines. I paused 19 scheduled tasks this morning. It barely helped. Spending kept climbing.

2. Duplicate long-running bots. Others recommend copying a bot to start its conversation fresh. But the copy loses everything the bot has learned about you.

3. Rethink group chats. This turned out to be the real cost. Every message in a group chat wakes every bot in it, even the ones with nothing to say. Most of my usage now comes from conversations, not automation.

Here's where we are. I'm moving shared project context out of group chats and into notes the bots read only when they need them. One lead bot per project. Fewer wake-ups.

It's helping. But I shouldn't have to reverse-engineer the billing to use the product the way it's designed.

Let me be clear. I'm not a freeloader. I don't expect free AI, and I'm happy to pay for real value. Grok Bot delivers real value.

What I can't do is commit a business to a platform when I can't predict what it will cost from one week to the next. That uncertainty is the problem.

The Grok Bot team has built something remarkable. I don't want to find an alternative, but I may have to. It all depends on whether SpaceXAI fixes this.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@MichaelHyatt @bot I hit the same wall with 24 bots, then cut to 10 on purpose.

The biggest fix was a cheap script that checks for work first. The bot only wakes when there's something real to do.

One lead bot per project is the right call. Which bot wakes up the most for you?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@gregisenberg What works for me: I wrote down how I actually talk, plus a list of phrases I never use. Every draft gets checked against it before I see it.

Then I read it out loud. If I wouldn't say it, it goes.

What's the first tell you cut?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@yongfook I went a step past the terminal. Most of my coding goes to agents now, and my job is reviewing what they hand back.

Do you still read every diff, or only the ones that touch money?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

My take: when I say distribution I mean one thing. Showing up every day in the replies where the people I want to help are already asking questions.

That's just a habit. It only turns into trust after months of it.

Which of your four would you bet on for someone starting from zero?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@thecsguy Does this have any impact on Original Content Rewards?

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@yongfook Non-coders skipped straight to the 2027 part. I run my businesses with 10 bots, and my whole job is now saying yes or no to what they make. The hard part wasn't the code. It was writing down what "good" looks like so they stop guessing.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@arnoldgamboa @bot Same worry here. The cheapest fix I found: compare how often each bot runs to how often it finds anything. One check of mine ran 14 times a day and came back empty 70% of the time, so a daily digest replaced it.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@sam_builds_ai Agree. What took the black box out for me: nothing goes out until I say yes, and every draft comes with a note on what it checked and where. People trust what they can see.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@stledgerdigital For me it was that the writing didn't sound like me. I kept re-explaining my style. What fixed it: one file built from my own messages, and every bot reads it before writing anything in my name.

[Justin Fredette @justinfredette]

@addyosmani Lived this. My agents redesigned my whole site in one day and I approved 6 pull requests from my phone. Then I found 3 bugs, two only in dark mode. Approving from a summary isn't checking.