Developer builds PowerShell wrapper to run AI scraper safely overnight without supervision

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A developer used a PowerShell script — generated by Claude — to automate overnight scraping of ten Reddit communities focused on AI and automation topics. The script managed state, enforced a hard spending cap by querying the provider's actual account spend, and batched subreddit requests in groups of three to avoid Reddit's 403 rate-limiting blocks. Failed or incomplete scrapes were automatically queued for retry without requiring manual intervention, allowing the pipeline to recover missed records while sleeping. Success was measured by the provider's delivered-record count rather than local database row changes, preventing false negatives caused by deduplication. The run expanded the research corpus from roughly 1,000 to 5,846 chunks at a cost of about $34, well below the estimated $118.

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