#automation

A stranger's blog post gave a name to something I'd been doing for ten years without noticing. An hour later I was checking my own work against his ten rules.

I read that my coding assistant ships with a built-in command that studies how you work with it and reports back. The first section, 'At a Glance', looked fine. The details read like it took five of my three thousand sessions and built the whole thing out of them.

Three years ago, I demoed a new customer's product catalog in our app. My scripts had pulled the category tree, the products, the prices. Only the colors couldn't be scripted: the data held just names.

I typed a three-letter command to run an AI code reviewer. It ran a screenshot reader instead. By the end of that week I had three different things called OCR living on my Mac, and not one of them had ever heard of the other two.

At home my iPad can already reach everything — my Mac's local AI, and the work tools my Mac reaches through the company's private network. RustDesk even beams the Mac's screen to my phone. But a screen you squint at through a café window isn't where you do real work. I wanted my iPad itself to reach what my Mac reaches — from anywhere.

The best ideas I have arrive when both my hands are on the handlebars, kilometres from a keyboard. For a while I could catch them. This week I taught the machine to actually do something with them.

My phone buzzed with a warning: 6% left. Six percent of what? I didn't know I was spending anything — and when I went looking, the thing draining it wasn't my tomatoes. It was the robot vacuum, fast asleep in its dock.

A fast little AI model I'd grown to like was about to stop being free. So I spent what I thought was its last free night wringing every drop out of it — a dozen coding sessions running at once on my Mac, and me steering eight of them from my phone while the laptop worked away in another room.

Last time, I could water my tomatoes by voice from another country. What I couldn't do was watch it happen. This is the part where the pump started talking back.

It was 37°C in Munich. Taking a break from a talk about token maxing, my mind wandered to my tomatoes — and the pump keeping them alive, which I was fairly sure I'd just bricked.

Somewhere on the autobahn to Austria, a colleague filed a support ticket at 130 km/h — both hands on the wheel the whole time.