Field notes

Things that broke in the automations I run myself: what happened, why, what it cost, and what I now put in every brief.

I run a set of scheduled jobs, bots and publishing pipelines that are supposed to work while I sleep. These are the times they did not, written up the way I would want a freelancer to write them up for me. None of them contain affiliate links.

1. August 2026The API said my posts failed. All five were live, and the retries kept goingCost: The retry ladder kept hitting posts that were already live, three of which went out within five minutes while it was still retrying. The ledger used to prevent duplicates was not updated, so the next slot could have published them again. The API has no delete, so a duplicate has to be removed by hand.
2. September 2026My automated image layout kept putting speech bubbles over the characterCost: Caught in my own review of the first episode. Three of the six scenes were regenerated and the renderer was changed the same day.
3. August 2026An update restarted my computer, every night job skipped, and the watchdog skipped with themCost: Five prepared items were left unpublished until about four hours before their 24-hour expiry. I published them by hand between 09:25 and 09:40, so nothing was lost, but the next automatic run would have been too late.
4. September 2026My batch job was killed halfway by low memory, and it picked up where it stoppedCost: The fifth batch did not complete and the sixth did not run. Progress already made was kept, because each item's state is recorded in the queue file.
5. September 2026One malformed field held back three batches of draftsCost: The three batches after it, about 15 drafts, passed the gate but were not checked or scheduled.
6. September 2026A plugin error almost published a page with an empty bodyCost: A page nearly went out with an empty body. It was found while the plugin was being changed, before any empty page was published.
7. September 2026My scheduled AI job received only the first five words of its instructionsCost: Caught in a test run before any unattended night. The AI noticed on its own that the instructions were incomplete and reported it.
8. September 2026My publishing job ran on time and published nothing, because the queue feeding it was quietly emptyCost: No posts from the evening of September 13 until the fix. None of the items produced in the new format had reached the publisher.
9. September 2026Search console verification by HTML file failed because my host redirected .htmlCost: Ownership could not be confirmed with that method, and nothing else in the console could be set up until it was.
10. August 2026My startup script ran at logon and silently did nothingCost: Without the helper running, the laptop drops into its low-power state when the screen turns off, which is what had delayed and skipped scheduled jobs the night before.
11. September 2026A status update in my content queue erased the questions I had left openCost: 13 drafts that had carried questions were sitting on the schedule. All 13 were moved back to the unscheduled placeholder date before the next automatic publish at 00:05, so none went out with its questions unanswered.
12. September 2026My scheduled posts stopped for two days, and every job reported successCost: Two days without posts. A separate backup job that used the same login also stopped, leaving four backups waiting to be pushed.
13. September 2026I published 437 reviews. There were 317: the page had loaded some of them twiceCost: One published page carried a count that was too high and a repeat-buyer share that was far too high, until it was corrected the same day.
14. August 2026Two silent failures on the same night, and every log said it was fineCost: Nothing was published from the evening run until the next morning, with 13 items waiting in the queue and no alert sent