Labs · Running daily since March
Can AI run my morning briefing?
I wanted the first ten minutes of my day back. Not a dashboard — a briefing, the way a chief of staff would give it. Here's the build, and the three times it embarrassed me.
The question
A chief of staff doesn't hand you a dashboard. They hand you three sentences and a recommendation. I wanted to know whether the current generation of tools could do the second thing, or only the first.
What I built
A scheduled job that runs at 5:40am and lands a plain-text briefing on my phone: calendar with conflicts flagged, anything that came in overnight that touches a commitment I've made, the two client threads that are waiting on me, and the weather only if it changes what I'd wear. No charts. No links unless I have to click one.
The whole thing is unglamorous plumbing — a handful of connected accounts, one scheduler, and a prompt I've rewritten roughly forty times. The prompt is where all the actual work lives, which is the lesson.
Where it embarrassed me
Three times worth writing down. It buried a canceled meeting under a weather note. It confidently summarized an email thread in a way that inverted who owed whom the deliverable. And for two weeks it cheerfully told me my Tuesday was clear because the recurring event was on a calendar it couldn't see.
None of these were model failures in the interesting sense. They were my failures to tell it what mattered. Which is the honest headline of this lab: I stopped asking it to decide what was important and started declaring it.
Would I recommend it
Yes — with the caveat that the first two weeks are worse than doing it yourself, and most people quit inside that window. If you'll stay past it, you get about forty minutes a day back. If you won't, don't start.