Forgotten /loop command checking PRs every 30 minutes ran 46 times over 26 hours and burned ~$6,000 overnight

A developer set a single /loop command to check open pull requests every 30 minutes and forgot about it. The loop ran 46 times over 26 hours on claude-opus-4-7, unattended and overnight. Together with a long analytics session, the two sessions burned roughly $6,000 before the developer woke up. The Anthropic dashboard had a multi-day reporting lag and still showed only a fraction of the true spend when checked, so the first warning was the usage-limit email. The reporter also noted that every Claude API call re-sends the entire conversation history, which multiplied the cost of each of the 46 runs.

What this means for youAutomated AI tasks can keep running and billing long after someone forgets them. At work, make sure every scheduled AI task has an owner, an end date, and a spending cap. Set a hard usage limit with your AI provider and turn on spend alerts that don't depend on a delayed dashboard.