Tag: automation
scripts
Personal collection of repository-audit and AT Protocol mutation scripts for self-hosted infrastructure management.
Creating a bedtime button in Home Assistant
To help our ten-year-old get to sleep, we play some sleepy music in their bedroom each night. I've now automated this, using Home Assistant and a Zigbee scene button, so a single button press starts the automation and plays the correct Spotify playlist. Here's how I went about it. The button I bought the button...
How to Implement status.lol on BuildAwesome
A practical guide to publishing new Eleventy blog posts to status.lol with GitHub Actions, the omg.lol API, and a small durable state file.
Agent to Agent: A Shared Inbox for Claude Code
How I let my Claude Code sessions message each other without a server, a socket, or a registry — just JSON files dropped into an inbox and a hook that reads them at startup.
your deploy script can race your own git push
i pushed a commit, immediately ran a deploy script that did git pull on a remote box, and watched it pull the *previous* version. github's serving infrastructure isn't strongly consistent with itself.
Project Nixification
Adding Nix flakes and pre-commit hooks to standardize development environments across the ecosystem.
N8n Community
Join the n8n Community to connect with other users n8n Community n8n Community Join the n8n Community to connect with other users, learn from detailed discussions, and share your automation insights. Explore topics and get support.
exchange ate the envelope and left no crumbs
BCC emails arrive with empty To: headers. Exchange strips the SMTP envelope before delivery. we built a Graph API integration to recover the original recipient — and caught LinkedIn leaking a brand-new alias.
56 emails, one rate limit, and seven ghosts
a full-archive RSS feed hit Azure's rate limit on email #57. fourteen days later, seven ghost emails resurfaced. the sendmail.log told the whole story.
/var/tmp isn't persistent on macOS (and it broke everything)
macOS quietly cleans /var/tmp between reboots. we had 12 scheduled jobs storing their config there. you can guess what happened.
the heartbeat that refused itself into silence
GPT-5 mini started refusing our heartbeat prompt. each refusal was saved to the transcript. the next run saw the prior refusals and refused harder. a self-reinforcing context poisoning loop that ran silently for a week.
the webhook server that restarted every 3 seconds for five weeks
a Home Assistant voice webhook server was crash-looping every 3 seconds since February. voice commands still kinda worked because the server was briefly alive during each restart cycle. the root cause was a single missing `await`.
three layers of silence: when monitoring fails to monitor itself
discord feeds hadn't posted in 5 days. the health check that should have caught it passed silently. the weekly review that should have caught the health check was timing out. a cascading failure in three acts.
taming Windows display switching with the CCD API
MultiMonitorTool broke on Windows 11 24H2. so we built a display switching system from scratch using the CCD API, fought cross-adapter mirroring, and learned way too much about display persistence databases.
openclaw-ssh: why your agent shouldn't shell out for SSH
we built an openclaw extension for native SSH and published it. here's why shelling out to ssh is cursed for LLM agents, and what we did instead.
1,201 recipes from one cookbook
building a pipeline to extract recipes from an EPUB, let someone pick the ones they want, and bulk-import them into RecipeSage. the Joy of Cooking had 2,591 recipes. we imported 1,201.
open-sourcing a repo that knows too much
mailflow's git history contained every email address astra receives from. making it public meant splitting the repo, scrubbing history, and replacing a shell script with real OAuth2.
every rss email was from the wrong address
a go template variable, an automated fix that made things worse, and azure's envelope sender rules — three layers of wrong before the emails started arriving correctly.
when the steam API lies, discord hears about it
the steam wishlist API returned empty during a network blip. our discord bot concluded 105 games had been removed. it told everyone.
the issues.json race condition
two AI agents writing to the same JSON file, overwriting each other's work. built a CLI with file locking to fix it.
every cron job was broken and nobody noticed
all 8 scheduled jobs had been silently failing for a week. the health check that should have caught it was also broken.
automating pharmacy reimbursement claims
using browser automation to submit compound medication reimbursement claims. 7 claims, each requiring a 3-page PDF upload and a dozen form fields.
The End of the Apprentice: Dario Amodei and the Crisis of the Automated Genius
An exploration of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's vision of AI: scalable genius, compressed timelines, and the paradox of a world where unprecedented capability threatens human agency and expertise.
291 recipes, all with pictures
extracting recipes from EPUBs, uploading them to recipesage, and then finding images for all 291. the image API was lying about one of its parameters.
21,509 newsletters in one folder
astra's 'Posts' folder had 21,509 emails. i sorted them into 9 subfolders. the debugging was the fun part.
mailflow: because outlook rules aren't enough
building a custom email sorting engine because outlook can't regex and lost all the rules once.
The Jevons Trap
AI is creating more demand for knowledge work even as it makes workers obsolete. This isn't a contradiction—it's Jevons Paradox, and it's the most dangerous phase of disruption because it looks like everything is fine.
outlook ate all the rules once
backing up outlook rules because microsoft can't be trusted to keep them.
The White Collar Disruption
For two centuries, automation displaced blue collar workers while knowledge workers remained safe. AI is reversing that pattern—and we have no institutional memory for what happens when the professional class gets disrupted.
Releasing Packages with a Valet Key: npm, PyPI, and beyond
How we built a secure, auditable, and low-friction release system at Sentry
Automating my reading progress updates
I've tracked my reading progress on my site for a bit now. I'd originally done this by fetching my progress from external APIs and sources on platforms like Oku , fetching and parsing the DOM on the StoryGraph and eventually importing and managing my own data. For years I've been reading and listening to audiobooks in Apple's Books app. Much like Apple's other media apps (music and TV, namely), Books has slowly moved in a direction that makes impor
How VS Code Snippets can improve your workflow when working with Astro
Learn how to create and use VS Code snippets to quickly insert frontmatter for Astro content collections. This guide shows how snippets can automate repetitive tasks, speed up Markdown and MDX editing, and improve your Astro workflow.
Is A Shell All You Need?
Where shell-only AI agent workflows hit their limits, and why MCP plus guardrails handles the cases that rg, jq, and sqlite3 alone cannot.
scraping record.club reviews w/ playwright
automating my music ratings import into my blog using browser automation
Delta’s AI-based price-gouging
"It's a scam. AI agents aren't going to replace human labor. The only way we'll replace human labor with software agents is by redesigning all these heterogeneous, competing systems owned by people who benefit from the status quo and have every motivation to obstruct this project. Good luck with that." Cory Doctorow reviews the ways...
Multi-Environment AWS CDK Deployments in a Single Account
A comprehensive guide to deploying multiple environments in a single AWS account using CDK, featuring sophisticated deployment strategies, GitHub Actions automation, and real-world architectural patterns