By Doris Boudreaux
Bot routines are easy to start and easy to forget. A routine that drafts the Monday sales summary or sorts support mail can run quietly for weeks, and quiet is not the same as healthy. The habit that has saved my small team the most trouble is a fifteen minute review every Friday afternoon. Here is the checklist we use.
Open the history for each active routine and look at the last seven days only. You are looking for three things. First, did it run as often as it should have? A daily routine with four runs in a week has a scheduling or trigger problem. Second, did the run times drift? A job that used to finish in seconds and now takes minutes is often fetching far more data than it needs. Third, did the output length change sharply? A summary that suddenly doubles or shrinks to one line usually means an upstream source changed shape.
Write one sentence per routine in the review document, even if the sentence is simply "normal week."
Most sensible routines pause and ask a person before they send, post, or change anything outside their own workspace. Those approval requests tell you a lot. Count how many were approved, how many were declined, and how many simply expired. Expired requests are the warning sign. They mean the routine is asking at the wrong time, asking the wrong person, or asking for something nobody cares about anymore.
If one routine had every request approved without edits for a month, discuss whether it has earned a little more freedom. If another had most requests declined, the instructions are wrong and need rewriting before next week.
Failures fall into a few familiar buckets, and naming the bucket points straight at the fix.
A single failure is noise. The same failure two Fridays in a row goes on the fix list with a named owner.
Pick one routine at random and read a real output in full, as if a customer or your manager wrote it. Is it accurate? Does it cite where its numbers came from? Would you be comfortable if it went out under your name? Rotating this catches slow quality decline that logs never show.
End by giving each routine one of three labels. Keep means it ran well and people used the result. Change means it works but needs a fix from the list above. Retire means it should stop.
Retiring is the step teams skip, so make the criteria explicit. Consider retiring a routine when nobody opened its output for three weeks, when its owner has left the team or changed roles, when a newer routine covers the same ground, or when its approvals expire more often than they are answered. Before you switch it off, save its instructions in an archive folder with a short note on why it was retired. Retired routines often come back later.
When a retired routine leaves a real gap, look for a proven pattern before writing a new one. I often browse botskillstack.com, a directory of Grok bot skills, xAI tool schemas, and Model Context Protocol tool definitions sorted into categories such as executive ops and productivity, to see how other people structured a similar job. Borrow the structure, then rewrite the details for your own tools and approval rules.
The goal is not a perfect system. It is a dull, reliable Friday habit that keeps small problems small. Same person, same fifteen minutes, same checklist, one line per routine. After a couple of months you will have a written history of every routine your team runs, and that history is worth more than any single clever automation.