A routine is burning tokens overnight
How to find which routine is spending, pause it in seconds, and rewrite the instruction so it stops when the job is done instead of checking forever.
Find it
Each Bot keeps the 20 most recent run records per routine. Open each Bot's routines, sort by last run, and look for the one with a run every hour or a run that lasted much longer than the others. If you have a spend watcher, its log will show the day the curve bent.
Pause it
Pause the routine, not the Bot, unless the Bot has several suspicious routines. Pausing is instant. Understanding can wait until morning.
The usual causes
- No stop condition. "Monitor the inbox for replies" runs until the heat death of the universe. Rewrite: "Once a day at 08:00, list replies received since the last run, summarise, stop."
- Wrong cadence. A routine that should run daily was set hourly during testing and never changed.
- Delegation loops. Bot A asks Bot B for something, B asks A for clarification, neither stops. See Bots talking in circles.
- Re-reading everything. A routine that re-reads a 400-row sheet every run instead of rows changed since last time.
Rewrite pattern
Every routine instruction we ship has four parts: when it runs, what it reads (bounded), what it produces, and when it stops. Plus a cap: "Take at most 25 actions per run. If more are needed, stop and report."
Verified 28 Aug 2026 · Facts about Grok Bot change during beta. See changelog.