Keep your own run log, and kill what's dead

Grok Bot keeps the 20 most recent run records for each routine — no more. On a five-minute schedule, twenty runs is only the last hour and forty minutes. So if a routine misbehaves at 2 a.m. and you look at 9, the evidence is already overwritten. Twenty runs is enough to see "is it working right now"; it is nowhere near enough to answer "what has this routine actually been doing all month."

The fix is cheap, and it uses a fact from Module 3: your Bots share one cloud computer and can write files. So have each routine write its own one-line log every time it runs. Add this to the end of every routine's instructions:

After every run, append one line to routines/log/<name>.csv:
time,result,changed,minutes,needed_approval,note

result is one of: ok, no_change, draft_left, failed
note is under 12 words. Create the file with that header if missing.

Now you have a history that outlives the 20-run window, sitting on the shared computer where any Bot can read it. And that history answers the question that actually saves you money: which routines should I kill?

Run a weekly review over those logs. You're looking for three patterns:

• Almost always "no_change." A routine that logs "no change" 95–100% of the time isn't monitoring anything — it's a standing fee. Either slow it down hard (daily instead of every five minutes) or delete it. If it's 99% "no change," it's almost certainly a delete.
• Fails often. A routine that logs "failed" regularly is eroding your trust and spending compute to produce nothing. Pause it, fix it, or retire it — don't let a known-flaky routine keep firing.
• Nobody reads its output. This is the quiet one. If the only way you'd notice a routine disappeared is that its log stopped growing, then it was never doing a job worth paying for. Kill it.

You can even make the review itself a routine — a weekly job that reads the log folder, tallies each routine's "no_change" and "failed" share, and posts you a short list of candidates to retire. Just hold it to the same rules as everything else in this course: have it recommend, and let you press delete (remember, deletes have no undo). The goal is a small set of routines you trust, each earning its place — not forty routines quietly burning your allowance while you've forgotten they exist.