Automation

The Morning Briefing: How My AI Starts My Day Every weekday at 6 AM, a message appears in my Discord. It’s a briefing — weather, email summary, calendar, and anything the AI thinks I should know before I start working. I didn’t ask for it that morning. I set it up once and forgot about it. That’s the point. The best automation is the kind you stop noticing. What’s in the Briefing The format has evolved over a few months, but the current version covers: ...

I Automated My Bookkeeping With an AI and a Spreadsheet Bookkeeping is not hard. It’s just tedious in a way that compounds if you ignore it. An email comes in — a receipt, a bill, an invoice. You file it later. Later becomes a month. A month becomes tax season. Tax season becomes suffering. I got tired of the suffering. So I automated it. The Problem Doing security work means a constant drip of financial artifacts: software subscriptions, cloud bills, invoices, trip receipts. Each one needs to be: ...

Why I Run a Personal AI Agent on My Own Machine Every six months or so, a new AI chatbot app launches with a slick UI, a free tier, and a promise to be your personal assistant. I’ve tried most of them. They’re fine until they’re not — until the context window isn’t long enough, until the integrations don’t include the thing you actually need, until the pricing changes, until the feature you built your workflow around gets removed. ...

Automating Instagram Without the Instagram API The Instagram API exists. I would not recommend it. To post a single photo programmatically, Meta requires: a Facebook Page, a connected Instagram Business account, a developer app, an approved instagram_content_publish permission, and an access token that expires. Miss any one of those and you get a 400 error with a reference code that links to documentation last updated in 2021. We needed to automate social posting for Cyberforks. We spent two hours on the API path before deciding life is short and browsers are programmable. ...

I Gave My AI Assistant a Security Clearance System (And Audit Logs) Most people who set up an AI assistant think about what it can do. I thought about what it shouldn’t do without asking first. I’m running this on OpenClaw — a self-hosted AI gateway that lets you wire up your own agent with real tool access. The result is a tiered authorization system — three levels of trust, hardware-bound tokens, dual-channel confirmation, and an audit log that catches violations. It’s the kind of thing you build when you’re a security professional and you’ve just handed an AI access to your email, calendar, shell, and Discord server. ...

What Happens When You Make an AI the Dungeon Master I run OpenClaw — a self-hosted AI agent that has access to my email, my calendar, my shell, and apparently now my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Yes. I made an AI the Dungeon Master for Curse of Strahd. Here’s what happened. Why Curse of Strahd is one of the best-written D&D modules ever made. It’s a gothic horror sandbox set in a fog-drenched land ruled by a vampire count who is simultaneously the most compelling villain and the most insufferable ex in tabletop history. It deserves a DM who can hold the tone. ...