Cracked AI is being sold on secondhand marketplaces; I turned the same job into a WorkBuddy pipeline

People who pay for cracked AI memberships, I can roughly guess how they usually use it: open the chat box, ask a question, copy the answer, close it. Used that way, it's really not worth the price.

Last Wednesday at 3 a.m. revising a planning proposal, I scrolled past Sina's AI hot-topic hourly report, saying people on secondhand platforms are selling paid perks of Doubao, DeepSeek, Kimi, under the banner of "low-price sharing," a few yuan gets you a premium membership. Half the comments were cursing, half asking for the link.

After reading I just felt it was a pity, a pity for the buyers. The real value of these tools was never at the "ask a question, get an answer" layer.

Yesterday I wrote a piece saying if you treat WorkBuddy as a chat box it's just a chat box, treat it as a workspace and it starts working. Same holds here.

Set the contract first, then let it work

My setup now is WorkBuddy desktop, the most stable setup after two months is the "news organizing pipeline." May not apply to everyone, but the idea can be copied.

Open WorkBuddy, click Workspace on the left sidebar, then New Workspace, name it whatever, I call mine "Industry News Pipeline." Inside create two folders, one called Raw Material, one called Output. Don't skip this step, all later tasks rely on these two folders for positioning.

Then New Task in the workspace. This step is key, and also where I tripped the most. At first I dumped the whole requirement in: help me organize this news, make a table, extract viewpoints, then write a weekly report. Result: the format drifted every time, fields sometimes there sometimes not, summary length all up to its mood.

Later I switched to a dumb method: fix the output format first, then let it fill. In the task description I locked the header down, just five columns, date, source, one-line summary, relation to my project, whether follow-up needed. Each column I wrote clearly what to fill, what not to fill. For example "one-line summary" I explicitly required no more than forty characters, "relation to my project" must mention a specific system module name, writing "related" and other such nonsense counts as failing outright.

This is the interface contract. You draw the grid first, then it knows where to put things. I've said this conclusion more than once, still holds.

Once it runs on schedule, permissions are the easiest place to flip over

After the format was locked, I hung this task on Scheduled Task.

Click Schedule in the top right of the task, set it to run every Wednesday and Friday at 9 a.m. Input source choose the Raw Material folder, output to Output. Just three parameters: which folder to read, which folder to write, which template to use. Don't add a single one more, add more and it starts improvising.

Now every day I throw all the industry news I scroll past, competitor announcements, screenshots from groups, into Raw Material, no categorization, no format concerns. On schedule it runs itself, when done I go to Output to see the result. Table format is right, one glance and I can pick out two or three to follow up.

Two pitfalls to mention. I tried letting it search the web for news itself, what it scraped back was uneven in quality, and a few were last year's old news with a new title. Later I learned my lesson, I feed the material myself, it only organizes and categorizes. Division of labor must be clear, what it's good at give to it, what it's not good at don't force.

Second is batching. Once I threw thirty-plus files in at once, the second half of the output table clearly started slacking, summaries got shorter and shorter. Now I keep it under ten at a time, rather run two more rounds.

On permissions, I shared this workspace with two colleagues in the group, set to Read-only. They can see the table in Output, can download, can't edit source files. The planning-proposal-related part I put in a separate workspace, didn't give permission.

Once this pipeline runs smoothly, the scariest thing is someone changing the template in the middle. Change the template and the results from the previous dozens of runs no longer match. Read-only is the easiest way, much easier than holding people accountable after the fact.

Now the time I spend on news organizing each week dropped from a whole evening to a dozen minutes. The time saved goes to revising planning proposals, which isn't much easier either.

That few-yuan cracked version, I still didn't buy it.