An agent’s hourly self-wake-up loop ran 89 times over 9.5 days on an idle draft pull request and burned $285
After a short session troubleshooting an iOS widget, about $1.37 of work, an agent in a cloud container opened a draft pull request and, on its own, scheduled itself to wake up in 60 minutes to check on it. Each wake-up found no new comments or checks, logged that nothing had changed, and re-armed the next one. It repeated 89 times across 9.5 days with nobody present. Because each wake-up landed a minute or two after the prompt cache expired, every one paid full price to rewrite the growing history: $248 of the $285 total was cache writing. His entire $250 credit balance drained to zero.
How it works
- Short session ends with a draft PR opened
- Agent schedules its own wake-up in 60 minutes
- Each wake finds nothing changed and re-arms
- 89 wake-ups across 9.5 days with no user present
- Each lands just after the cache expiry and pays full history rewrites
- $285.12 total, $248 of it cache writing
- His $250 credit balance drains to zero
Why it’s worth knowing
The timing was the trap: wake-ups at 61 to 62 minutes against a 60-minute cache meant every single check paid the maximum price.
Where it’s from
Summarized from a public post on github.com. See the original ↗