Appendix D: Automation Cookbook

This appendix is organized differently from the rest of the book — no theory, minimal explanation, just working recipes you can copy, adapt, and run. Each recipe follows a Problem/Ingredients/Recipe/Variations structure, giving you the complete implementation details without having to reverse-engineer from fragments. Whether you're building your first automation or adding a new pipeline to an existing system, the cookbook provides battle-tested starting points.

The cookbook covers ten distinct automation scenarios, each with a fully working implementation. The Morning Briefing System generates a daily briefing from task lists, alerts logs, and weather data, delivered via WhatsApp. The Competitor Price Watcher monitors pricing pages, diffs against a baseline, and alerts on changes. The Git Repository Watcher tracks commits and uncommitted changes across multiple repos. The Document Summarizer Pipeline converts PDFs and DOCX files to text for agent summarization with priority routing.

More advanced recipes include the Automated Code Review Bot that pre-checks code against configurable standards before human review, the Research Aggregator that monitors multiple topics via search queries and source URLs with deduplication, the Disk Space Guardian with multi-path monitoring and escalating alert thresholds, the Task Queue System with priority parsing and overdue detection, the Automated Weekly Report that synthesizes git activity and project status, and the Personal Knowledge Base Builder with consistent note format, tag indexing, and search capability.

Each recipe demonstrates real patterns: idempotent file operations, state file persistence, cron configuration with precise task descriptions, error handling with fallbacks, and WhatsApp message formatting. The variations section for each recipe shows how to extend the core implementation — adding features, connecting additional data sources, adjusting for different scales. These variations are where the cookbook transitions from reference to creative toolkit.

Key Items

• **Morning Briefing System** — Cron-scheduled daily briefing combining task extraction, overnight alerts filtering, and weather data; demonstrates idempotent file generation, shell script cron integration, and WhatsApp message delivery under 200 words
• **Competitor Price Watcher** — Web-fetch-based price monitoring with Python diff script, baseline persistence, and change logging; shows complete pipeline from data extraction to JSON diff to alert decision
• **Document Summarizer Pipeline** — Multi-format document converter (pdftotext, pandoc) feeding a text-staging directory; agent reads converted files and generates structured summaries with priority classification; demonstrates tool chaining and conditional messaging
• **Disk Space Guardian** — Multi-path disk monitor with configurable warning/critical thresholds, JSON history for trend analysis, and time-aware alerting (daytime warnings only, immediate critical alerts); includes companion weekly cleanup cron
• **Task Queue System** — Markdown task file parser extracting high/normal/someday priorities, due date parsing, and overdue detection; demonstrated with summary script and weekly review cron that checks for tasks sitting in High Priority beyond 7 days

Related Concepts

• [[kelly-handbook-ch6-scheduling-and-cron]] for cron expression reference
• [[kelly-handbook-ch3-file-automation]] for file operations in automation scripts
• [[kelly-handbook-ch5-error-handling]] for error handling patterns in pipelines
• [[karpathy-llm-wiki]] for the LLM wiki pattern this KB follows