What Does an AI Agent on Your Own PC Do in a Week?
It runs your repeat jobs while you are away: hundreds of small tasks, each started, checked and cleaned up. Mine started 992 in six days on one Windows PC, and the hard part was keeping that PC alive.
📊 The week: 992 jobs started in 6 days, on one Windows PC.
💥 The catch: Twice in September one job with no limit froze the whole machine.
🔒 The fix: Every heavy job now queues and runs under a memory cap.
What it did
Each bar is one day of work. Tap a bar to see the count.
In the same seven days it merged 12 branches into this site and added 6 blog pages.
What went wrong
On 6 September a 20 GB job ate the PC. On 9 September another passed 90 GB against a 56 GB limit, the screens went black, and only a hard reset worked.
Figure 1
One big job
Data
Tap a station to see why.
| Step | Uncapped | Capped |
|---|---|---|
| Start | OK: It starts fine. Nothing asks how much memory it needs. | OK: It waits in a queue and is told how much memory it may use. |
| Memory | FAIL: It grew past the PC's memory limit. Twice in September that froze the machine and every session with it. | OK: Hits its cap, gets stopped, and only that job dies. |
| Cleanup | FAIL: Leftover programs stay running. One day's count: 33 console windows, 24 shells, 20 node, 32 Chrome. | OK: Everything the job started is stopped when it ends. |
| Report | FAIL: No report: the session was killed with the PC. | OK: Reports the peak memory it used, so the next cap fits. |
Source: Incidents on 6 and 9 September 2026 (a 20 GB job; a job that reached 90+ GB against a 56 GB limit) and the 8 September process count.
Think of a fuse box: one toaster with no fuse can black out the house. A fuse per socket means only the toaster dies.
The mess it leaves behind
On 8 September I counted what agents had left running after their jobs ended.
| Left running | Count |
|---|---|
| Console windows | 33 |
| Chrome | 32 |
| Shells | 24 |
| Node | 20 |
The rule now: whatever a job starts, it stops before it ends.
Is an agent on your PC worth it?
Yes, if one chore repeats every week and you can name it. Start with that one chore, cap its memory, and make it stop everything it starts.
Do
- Start with one chore that repeats weekly
- Cap memory and make every job clean up
Don't
- Hand it the whole machine on day one
- Leave a job running with no exit
Want one chore off your plate? A fixed $250 build, scope written before I start: Get a written scope.
Sources: worker status files dated 24 to 29 September 2026 (jobs per day), and this site's git history for the 7 days to 30 September (merges, pages). Incidents were on 6, 8 and 9 September on one PC, so your numbers will differ.
Related: the real cost of a skill that fails silently, how to create a Claude Code skill and what a custom skill costs.