I built my project plans during my second week at a new job, back when I understood maybe a third of what I was hearing. Two months later I opened one of them and nothing in it meant anything to me. So instead of fixing it from memory, I pointed Claude at four months of meetings, Slack, and email and had it rebuild the whole thing from the record. It found work I'd completely forgotten finishing, and tasks I'd agreed to and never written down.

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.

Someone asked a question in a company Slack channel that wasn't addressed to me, and it sent me off to Perplexity asking what I could actually do about the environmental cost of using AI constantly. I made a few changes that week and forgot about it. Eleven months later I went back and checked which ones survived, and found that the habit I'd dropped was the wrong one, the habit I kept religiously does nothing at all, and the two changes that genuinely mattered were ones I'd

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.