took this advice and audited my Grok
@bot setup as I was mega burning usage
most of mine was testing, setup, and experiments… here were my problems
and how I hopefully fixed them:
→ accidentally had a routine running every 15 minutes… that is 96 times a day (audit your routines)
→ two of the same routine were also running on two bots at once… ngl I still don't know how it happened or why (check across bots, not just within one)
→ a bot I had told to be inactive was still checking websites 12 times a day. telling the bot it was inactive did nothing (once again routines can be separate from a bot… hopefully you're getting the point now)
→ my main chat also got so long that every routine attached to it re-read the whole chat before answering (double check your routines are on the bots that do the job, not all in the chat you talk in)
→ I posted in group channels without tagging a bot… all three responded and answered the same question (tag one bot or pay 3x for the same answer)
→ make sure your chief of staff doesn't confirm a task, chase it, then confirm the receipt… that's four messages for one job (a huge no no… send it once, step away, and have some patience, tweak as you go if you have issues)
→ I ran 800 skill evaluation tests, a lot of them back to back and had bots read the whole skill file each time… fine for a one time test, expensive af when the chain is long (batch them over time, and don't make every bot reread the whole file to check one thing)
→ I had bots forwarding messages to each other across channels. same images and docs sent twice (avoid this setup it's more costly)
→ I was starting more tasks the second a job landed (do one at a time, leave gaps between them, don't auto chain everything it will burn your usage faster)
→ I kept having a bot run a long looping task inside chat instead of running it once (have a Cursor cloud agent write the script, then the bot just runs the file)
my guess is by next week my system could run 60-70% more cost effective and smoother after these changes.
I will post my thoughts either way.
$1,048 is what bad habits can cost us.
save these tips so they don't cost you.