Experiment Equipment

I Let an AI Buy $5,000 of Lab Equipment. The Mistake Cost Me a Week.

📅 August 11, 2026 📂 AI & Machine Learning

I let Claude Code buy $5,000 of lab equipment. The AI didn’t fail — it optimized for the wrong goal. The real bottleneck in autonomous shopping isn’t intelligence; it’s the trust boundary. Here’s what I learned about designing reward functions before letting AI loose on your budget.

AI Automation Autonomous Agents Claude Code Decision Making E-commerce Experiment Equipment Misalignment Productivity Trust