A frustrated engineer wielding a whip at a computer labeled AI Minion

Flogging Claude

Adventures in Cowork

$ claude --please-just-work-this-time
what happens when you beat on an AI until it builds things

charles@cuchulainn: ~/the-idea

# the premise
$ cat README.md

I'm a platform engineer who decided to see what happens
when you go all-in on AI as a daily tool. Not as any
sort of data scientist or other mad genius, but as a
practitioner building real things.

So I gave Claude a job. And then I gave it another one.
And when it got something wrong, I made it do it again.
And again. And again.

# this blog is the incident report.

$ claude "build me something useful"
Error: ambiguous request. Did you mean:
  a) something that works
  b) something that works on the second try
  c) something you'll rewrite anyway
Defaulting to (c).

Dispatches from the Terminal

April 4, 2026

Token Budgets, Plan Usage Limits and Secret Workarounds

What happens when you hit the usage limit on Claude Pro Max, try OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi, and discover that Dispatch lets you flog from your phone.

usage-limits cowork dispatch

What Is This

I'm Charles. I build and run infrastructure for a living. Somewhere along the way I started using Claude for everything and it became a weird, occasionally productive partnership.

This is the raw log of that experiment. What works, what doesn't, what made me close the laptop and go outside. If you've ever stared at an AI response and thought "that's not even close to what I asked for," you'll feel right at home.

15+ Years in SRE

AWS Home Turf

Claude The Victim

∞ Retries