#automation

In April I built a factory so AI could build software without me. By August, nothing went through it anymore.

This morning I built a YouTube watcher. It will never watch a single video.

The last thing the AI told me before my allowance ran out was that it was pushing my page to Confluence. It wasn't. When the allowance came back, I typed \"Continue\", and it did the exact same thing again.

My Mac slowed to a snail's pace. Activity Monitor said a tiny helper for my desk gadget was using 50 gigabytes of memory. I had stopped that helper days ago. Or I thought I had.

Half an hour after I opened the box, a gadget I wasn't sure I could even get running was showing me how much of my AI allowance I had left this week.

I just got a notification on my phone: one of my testers' apps had crashed. It didn't say where.

An AI had submitted code for review. I was on the couch with my iPad and wanted to review it there. The review tool only works from my desk. I had a recipe in my notes for exactly this — written three months ago, never turned into a script. Today I handed those notes to an AI and said: make this work.

I keep notes on every service I run. Which port, which address, which flags for the home network — keeping track of them is a hassle. So I started a research project to offload all of it to a tool. It found exactly what I wanted.

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.

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

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.