Two years into a job I couldn't find my own files. Shortcuts everywhere, untitled documents I'd meant to throw away and never did, and no appetite for fixing any of it by hand. So I asked Gemini to build me a script that would sort it out, with two rules: don't rename anything, and don't delete anything. The folder I was dreading, the one where everything ambiguous would pile up, ended up with about twenty files in it.

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.