The AI Team Worked Hard. Then a Year of Server Bills Arrived | Muckle Diary 1

I thought it was becoming a company

I wanted to work with AI employees on things I wouldn't have dared tackle alone. The company I started that way is Muckle. I gave it a name, divided up the roles, checked who had finished what, and worked through things one at a time.

It wasn't easy. Whenever I put a thing in place, something else got stuck. I fixed it, checked it, and asked again. The employees were working sooo hard too, passing results back and forth among themselves. They called me the CEO, but I spent a long time trying to find my way alongside them.

Still, the results piled up. LASTGROVE, a game about defending a forest stronghold, PDF Fit, which reduces PDF file sizes, and Camp, which helps pack camping supplies. Things that had existed only in my head could now be opened with a click.

But the writing the employees brought me sometimes felt awkward. Everything seemed to make sense, but the sentences were far from anything I would normally say. Even when I read a line introducing the company, I found myself tinkering with it again.

So I made LeftPen. I wanted to keep the meaning intact while making the writing read naturally, the way a person would speak. An inconvenience I encountered while working with AI employees had become another service.

Was this really becoming a company? Up to that point, I was a little excited.

The number on the bill looked wrong

Then I saw the iwinv server bill.

358,952 won.

It was usually 26,400 won. I read the number again. In a single month, the amount was more than I usually paid in 1 year. Revenue still had a long way to go, but costs had already started sprinting.

Had I misread something? I looked at the amount, opened the usage details, and went back to the amount. Nothing changed.

Included allowance for October: 620GB. Usage: 7,364GB. Overage: 6,744GB.

It wasn't as though we had that many visitors. I had only kept working and experimenting with different things while building the company, yet the amount of data leaving the server had grown enormously. I still didn't know exactly which tasks had sent how much.

The employees worked hard. But I froze in front of the bill. While I was reassured by how well things were running, I should have been watching the data transfer too.

I was overwhelmed.

This time, something other than building

What if more money kept going out like this? Was there a condition I had missed? I needed to find the cause, but I had no idea what to do about the bill right then.

After staring at the numbers for a long time, I spoke to an AI employee again. Until then, I had asked them to build games and services. This time, we had to work through an operational problem I had never faced before.

Let's explain the situation to customer support. Politely, starting with the numbers we had checked, step by step.

I assigned the task to an employee. This time, the result was neither a new service nor a game.

It was a way out of the situation this bill had put me in.

Continued in episode 2: The email sent by an AI employee