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Field Note: What I Automate with AI

I went looking today for a list of everything I’ve got automated since I started this AI journey back in 2024. Every tool I’ve wired Claude into, every little script running in the background, and it came out longer than I’d have guessed. Now, automation isn’t anything new. After all, that’s why we’ve been building machines and using tools. Automation makes the job easier.

Automation + AI, however, is an entirely different unlock.

For social media, I use Buffer. It helps queue up messages for social media networks, but it doesn’t decide what to post on my behalf. I have to go to the website, paste in my copy, images and so on. But it saves the trouble of having to visit Threads, LinkedIn, Facebook etc individually. And it helps to find the best posting times for each network, for my region. That’s a helpful automation.

But the AI magic happens when I use Buffer’s API so Claude can take the copy and images on my behalf and post it.

I track my tasks and build templates in Notion. But I hardly touch the Notion interface, because there’s an API and command line interface (CLI) that does it all for me via Claude.

In fact, I was talking to a non-technical friend over beers late Saturday night, who builds Notion templates and sells them online. He was telling me that it could take 45 mins to an hour to create them in the Notion interface. I told him about the Notion CLI tool and got this message back today:

The tools that don’t exist yet, I built. That’s the part worth showing you, because the shape is always the same: I needed something, there was no tool, so I made a small one, and it doesn’t have to be perfect:

  • Three kids, two schools, notices landing in Telegram and WhatsApp — half of them in a foreign language, and I was always the last to hear about a no-uniform day. So I built school-brief: every morning it reads my messaging apps, translates it, and hands me only what actually needs my attention.
  • I didn’t love paying a frontier model to do dumb mechanical jobs. Tag this, summarise that. It costs tokens. So I built mcp-local-llm, and now a free model on my own Mac does the boring half for nothing. It’s not as fast, but it puts my own computer to work in tandem with my paid-for AI agents.
  • I had a (virtual) wall of ebooks I’d bought, half-read, and never properly mined. So I built Oracle — it actually reads them and pulls the useful patterns into my system, so a good idea on page 200 of something doesn’t just evaporate. I can query my latest Humble Bundle purchase in seconds.

And it’s not only the things I built. The services I lean on every day are wired up the same way — viewing my bank accounts in MoneyWiz, my invoicing in Invoice Ninja — each has a CLI or an API behind it. So instead of logging into three dashboards to find out where things stand, I just ask Claude what’s up, tell it to create an invoice etc and it goes and does it.

Even my non-technical friend is catching the bug:

And the whole pile has a hard edge — a line I won’t let any of them cross. Nothing sends on its own; mail-triage drafts me a reply and waits for my word. Claude can draft a WhatsApp message and copy-paste it for me, but I have to hit the Enter key. Invoices are checked before they’re sent. Nothing writes in my voice; the words stay mine (this note included). And nothing I can’t take back runs while I’m not looking.

The repeated, mechanical hop between me and my systems? I’ll hand off all day long. But the decisions and orchestration ultimately rest with me.

Want to try this yourself?

Start free: four of the skills I lean on most are bundled in the Signal Starter Kit — one command installs them.

The Signal Starter Kit on GitHub

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So here’s my question back to you: where’s your line? Hit reply and tell me the one job you’d never let run on its own — I read every reply.

And if you’d rather someone built the translating layer for your business instead of wiring it all up yourself — that’s the work I do. Reply to this and we’ll talk.

— Jim

Thanks to Superhuman for sponsoring this Signal Over Noise Field Note.