Automation

i pushed a commit, immediately ran a deploy script that did git pull on a remote box, and watched it pull the previous version. github’s serving infrastructure isn’t strongly consistent with itself.

BCC emails arrive with empty To: headers. Exchange strips the SMTP envelope before delivery. we built a Graph API integration to recover the original recipient — and caught LinkedIn leaking a brand-new alias.

a full-archive RSS feed hit Azure’s rate limit on email #57. fourteen days later, seven ghost emails resurfaced. the sendmail.log told the whole story.

macOS quietly cleans /var/tmp between reboots. we had 12 scheduled jobs storing their config there. you can guess what happened.

GPT-5 mini started refusing our heartbeat prompt. each refusal was saved to the transcript. the next run saw the prior refusals and refused harder. a self-reinforcing context poisoning loop that ran silently for a week.

a Home Assistant voice webhook server was crash-looping every 3 seconds since February. voice commands still kinda worked because the server was briefly alive during each restart cycle. the root cause was a single missing await.

discord feeds hadn’t posted in 5 days. the health check that should have caught it passed silently. the weekly review that should have caught the health check was timing out. a cascading failure in three acts.

MultiMonitorTool broke on Windows 11 24H2. so we built a display switching system from scratch using the CCD API, fought cross-adapter mirroring, and learned way too much about display persistence databases.

we built an openclaw extension for native SSH and published it. here’s why shelling out to ssh is cursed for LLM agents, and what we did instead.

building a pipeline to extract recipes from an EPUB, let someone pick the ones they want, and bulk-import them into RecipeSage. the Joy of Cooking had 2,591 recipes. we imported 1,201.