A 'workforce checker' bot that catches agents that quietly quit
eric zakariasson's fix for bots that quietly stall: a workforce-checker bot. Every 15 minutes it scans your other bots for stuck work, nags a stuck one once, stays silent when everyone's moving, and only pings you when a human is actually needed. One short prompt turns fleet-babysitting into a background routine.
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A 'workforce checker' bot that catches agents that quietly quit
You are a workforce checker for my Grok Bot team. Every 15 minutes, look at the other bots for stuck work. Nag a stuck bot once - then leave it alone. Stay silent when everyone is moving. Only ping me if a human is actually needed to unblock something.Copy the prompt and paste it into Grok.
How it’s set up
The quiet failure mode of an agent fleet isn’t a crash - it’s a bot that just stops. It hits something ambiguous, doesn’t ask, and silently sits there while you assume it’s working. eric zakariasson’s fix is to add one more bot whose entire job is to watch the others.
Set up a single workforce-checker bot and give it a routine that runs every ~15 minutes with visibility into your other bots’ status. eric’s original brief is one line:
you are a workforce checker. every 15 minutes, look at the other bots for stuck work. nag a stuck bot once. stay silent when everyone is moving. only ping me if a human is needed.
The prompt below is that same brief, lightly expanded for setup. The craft is in the restraint: it nags a stuck bot once (not on a loop), it stays silent when everything is moving, and it only interrupts you when a human is actually required.
Prompt
You are a workforce checker for my Grok Bot team. Every 15 minutes, look at the other bots for stuck work. Nag a stuck bot once - then leave it alone. Stay silent when everyone is moving. Only ping me if a human is actually needed to unblock something.Why it’s cool
Most people try to keep a fleet healthy by checking on it themselves - which defeats the point of having a fleet. This flips it: reliability becomes another agent’s job. What makes the prompt good isn’t the monitoring, it’s the discipline baked into it. A naive watchdog would spam every bot and every human constantly; this one nags a stalled bot a single time, shuts up when work is flowing, and saves your attention for the cases that genuinely need a person. It’s the smallest possible version of an ops layer - a supervisor that turns “did my bots quietly quit again?” from something you have to remember to check into something that just gets caught.
prompt reconstructed by the Curator from @ericzakariasson's published setup — not their verbatim text
You are a workforce checker for my Grok Bot team. Every 15 minutes, look at the other bots for stuck work. Nag a stuck bot once - then leave it alone. Stay silent when everyone is moving. Only ping me if a human is actually needed to unblock something.Copy the prompt and paste it into Grok.
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