I burned ~1M tokens overnight — two rules fixed it

Burned about a million tokens overnight on a single automation run. Roughly 4x what I estimated.

I set up an overnight job to fan a bunch of agents out across a big task, went to sleep feeling clever, woke up to a quota warning.

The mistake: I never checked my quota before launching, and I didn't right-size the job. I just told it "go" and let it multiply agents until it ran out of room. No cap, no anchor.

What saved me: I'd committed the state to git before the run. So the work wasn't lost — I could resume from the last checkpoint instead of paying to redo all of it.

Two rules I follow now before any overnight run. Check the quota first — if the job needs more than I have, it doesn't launch. And anchor state before you fan out — git commit, save point, whatever. Assume the run dies halfway.

Cheap lesson to learn once. Expensive to learn twice.

What's the most tokens or money you've torched on an automation that got away from you?

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I burned ~1M tokens overnight — two rules fixed it