Hello GPT Developers,
You know that green eco-friendly button on ATMs when you don’t want a receipt? It saves costs and resources at scale, assuming that’s not just a European thing.
I’ve come up with a similar question/button for you!
We are a small company that uses Google Workspace and Google Cloud services connected through scripts. My idea is probably not relevant for businesses that operate 24/7. It’s more about the huge number of users like us—people who don’t run an e-commerce store but still need to connect their CRM system with other tools.
What if scripts could sleep at night?
My original goal was simple: I don’t really need my colleagues to be woken up by notifications between 8 PM and 7 AM telling them that a new lead has arrived. They’ll see it in the morning anyway, and who is that curious about new leads in the middle of the night?
Then it occurred to me: I used to fail Pascal classes in high school, yet today I can vibe-code a basic CRM system. How many people like me will there be in the future? How many scripts are running overnight without serving any real purpose? And how much could that save in operating costs?
I’ve read claims that a complex AI prompt may consume about as much energy as running a microwave for a short time, so I started doing some rough calculations.
One of my scripts collects data from 50 spreadsheets, creates unique IDs as if it were a traditional database to avoid duplicates, waits 10 minutes, and then checks one spreadsheet every minute. Each spreadsheet contains around a thousand rows, and the process runs every minute.
My quick research suggests that the operating cost of a single script is probably only a few cents/year. But multiplied how many times? One million? Five million? Ten million?
Could this become your green button for generated scripts and automations?
“Would you like this script to sleep outside business hours?”
It would surely save the equivalent of many thousands of tons of apples.
PS: If any GPT developers happen to read this, it would be great if AI-assisted coding tools asked users whether their automation truly needs to run overnight. It could become GPT’s own “green eco button.” It’s not a miracle solution, just another drop in the ocean—but large oceans are made of drops.