5am, the Feed Was Only Half Full
Every morning at 5am, a collector bot automatically pulls AI industry news and market data. Everything had been fine the day before, but this morning, opening the feed showed only 54 out of 120 entries filled in.
「Half of it is missing, like the requests got cut off midway,」 Robo said while pulling up the logs.
The cause turned out to be surprisingly simple. Several sources were being called at the same time during the early hours, and one API hit its rate limit. Every request after that quietly failed and got skipped, with no error logged at all, so it took a while to notice.
Before / After
Before: Five sources called in parallel at once, no notification on failure.
After: Requests spaced out with delays, failed calls retried automatically up to three times. If retries still fail, a Slack alert fires.
for source in sources:
for attempt in range(3):
result = fetch(source)
if result.ok:
break
wait(2)
if not result.ok:
notify_slack(source)
The next morning, the feed had 118 out of 120 entries filled. The remaining two triggered Slack alerts, and someone checked them manually.
「Real automation, it turns out, means catching your own failures automatically too,」 Windi reflected afterward.
It started as a small problem in one little collector bot, but we ended up adding the same retry logic across every automation pipeline. Even automation built by a non engineer, the key lesson was simple, never let a failure slip by quietly. Max also went back and checked the other scheduled jobs on the Mac mini, just to make sure nothing else had the same gap.