Last week's post was about how it felt. This one is about what's actually running underneath it: two scheduled tasks, no code, and the specific guardrails that kept it from falling apart the first two weeks. If you want to build something like this yourself, this is the version with the actual mechanics.

My phone was 96% full and I was leaving for vacation in a few days. The reason I couldn't clear it was an external hard drive I'd been avoiding for years — 25 years of photos, buried in backups of backups, scattered across 30-plus folders. I gave myself the weekend and let AI do the heavy lifting. It recovered 2,101 photos I didn't know I had — including the full Morocco trip I thought was only 304 photos. The number that mattered most: zero deletions.