Posts tagged: Automation

A lot of the meetings on my calendar today seem to exist to gather something. Get everyone’s status so the group can align. Articulate two options side by side to compare. Create a report for the people who weren’t in the room. In each case, we (humans) are moving information from one place to another.

Most of that can be a prompt right now. The context is already there: in docs, threads, and trackers, a model can read all of it, and what used to take a room full of people and an hour now takes a good question and a few minutes.

For a while I was doing what most people do: one AI assistant, one big context window, everything in one place. Convenient on paper. In practice, it’s a bit like asking the same person to be your chef, your accountant, and your personal trainer. The context bleed alone makes everything worse.

I’ve been running a different setup for a few months now and it’s holding up better than anything I’ve tried before. Three agents, each with a distinct identity and a narrow job. This is the writeup.

I self-host Planka on my homelab and use it to manage everything from software side projects to household finances to recurring chores. It’s open source, it’s fast, and it does what I need without the bloat.

What I wasn’t happy with was the friction of keeping it in sync with what I was actually doing. Every time I finished a task, I’d context-switch to a browser tab, find the card, drag it to the right column, maybe update the description. Thirty seconds per card, but across multiple boards and dozens of cards a week, it compounds into overhead rather than organization.