I run my Upwork business through Blackbox, the assistant I built with Claude Code that lives on pinebox, my little cloud server. From my laptop I type bb triage, and it reads the new Upwork jobs that match my searches, checks each one against my playbook, and sorts them into the ones worth a proposal and the ones I should turn down, with a reason for each. Then bb pitch drafts the proposal and answers the screening questions, I read it, I paste it into Upwork, and bb sent records it and shows me the next one.
Today it said "Triaging 8 of 86 new jobs against your playbook," and three proposals later it said "Triaging 8 of 83." I worked through what it gave me: a psychology clinic that wanted help with Google, Maps, and AI search, a B2B consultancy whose rankings had stalled, and a solo clinical practice looking for a senior AI and SEO consultant. All three went out. Then I asked Claude Code the obvious question. Why eight? Is eight a big enough bite?
The answer is that eight was a number we picked on October 3, when I first taught bb to judge jobs. Every verdict is a call to an AI model that reads my whole playbook and the whole job posting, so each one costs a little money and a little waiting. Eight per run kept both small. bb already sorted the pile so that invitations from clients came first and the best-paying jobs came next, so the eight were the best eight. But with eighty-three waiting, clearing the pile would take about eleven runs.
Claude's recommendation was to stop treating every job the same. Every invitation and every job bb stars for its pay now gets a verdict on every run, however many there are, and the cap of eight applies only to the unstarred rest. I said yes, and it went live on pinebox the same afternoon, with a test that checks the new line says exactly how many it took and why.
Earlier in the same session I had asked for something even smaller. On Upwork, pitching a job and applying to it are the same act, and I type both words. Only bb pitch worked. Now bb apply does too. It seemed like such an obvious alias.
When I asked why eight, I got the date the number was chosen, the reason for it, and a better rule, and the better rule shipped the same day.