Yesterday a slightly unhinged automation dropped on r/PromptEngineering, and it’s exactly the kind of clever that makes you rethink your own setup.
The setup: ChatGPT caps scheduled tasks at five active slots, which is fine right up until you stack outreach, portfolio checks, news briefings, AI maintenance, and whatever idea felt brilliant at 2 AM. Reddit user u/sam03069 hit that wall and, instead of paying for more slots, decided to use the five better.
Here’s the twist. The obvious fix is flipping schedules on and off by hand. The original poster called that “ridiculous”, because manually managing automations is just… more repetitive work, the exact thing automation was supposed to kill. So they automated the babysitting too. The build is called “Schedule Manager”: one scheduled task whose entire job is waking up the others.
Here’s how it runs, reverse-engineered straight from the post:
- Most workers stay paused. Nothing runs unless it’s about to.
- When a worker gets within 65 minutes of its scheduled run, Schedule Manager flips it active.
- The worker fires on its original schedule, does its job, done!
- Manager checks whether it actually ran. Still far from its next run? Back to sleep.
End result: four core workflows stay live, and the fifth slot turns into a “hot desk.” One task uses it, leaves, another moves in later.
Pro tip straight from this Redditor’s build: guardrail a meta-scheduler before you trust it with real work. Some tasks got marked protected and untouchable, the manager checks the live task count before enabling anything, and if two workers want the same slot, whichever is due soonest wins.
One commenter, u/ops_and_chaos, put it better than I could: “This is completely unhinged and I mean that as a compliment.” Fair. The workers themselves have no clue any of this is happening. They wake up, run, and disappear again.
If you’re bumping into the same five-task ceiling, steal the pattern: one manager task, a wake-before-run buffer, a sleep-after-run check, and guardrails so nothing collides. Cheaper than the upgrade, and honestly more fun to build! Go check out the full thread and comments on r/PromptEngineering 🧵, the author digs into the priority logic deeper than I have room for here.
The problem with building too many useful AI automations
by u/sam03069 in PromptEngineering