The wrapper that made my overnight AI scraper safe to leave running

I wanted a small research database to grow from one subreddit to ten communities where people talk about building with Claude Code and automation. Doing it properly was estimated at about $118. It cost about $34, and the corpus went from roughly 1,000 chunks to 5,846. Overnight, while I slept. The scraping ran through a paid provider (Apify) that charges per delivered record. The cleaning, tagging and indexing were my own Python. Around all of it sat one PowerShell script, which Claude wrote for me. That script is what this post is about, because the agent isn't the hard part. Anyone can make an agent do something impressive while they're watching. The hard part is the wrapper that makes it safe to stop watching. Three rules. 1. Every phase is resumable The script keeps its own state: chunks before and after, spend at the start and end, what it recovered and what it couldn't. All of it is set before the work starts and read again at the end. Scraping is the phase that fa