When I Narrowed My Human Inputs Down to Just Todoist and Discord, the System Started Running Itself

Originally published on my Substack . I'm a Microsoft MVP based in Japan, writing in English about the AI agent systems I actually run in production. AI tools have multiplied. So have agents, skills, and automation scripts. And yet, somehow, my hands are never free. I wake up, open a dashboard, check notifications, go look at the logs for a failed job, and think, "wait, where was that process even running?" Every time I add one more automation, I add one more place I have to go check. That was me, up until last year. The cause was clear: I kept thinking about what to have AI do, and never once designed where I myself would touch things. So I rewrote my policy down to one line. There are only two things a human does: throw tasks into one place, and have conversations in one place. No other entry points get added. 🤖✍️ This article was co-written with AI — an AI agent (Claude Code) generated the draft automatically based on real collaborative work with Ebisuda, who then reviewed and revised it before publishing. In this series, I share the systems I've actually built using AI as case studies — including both the ones that worked and the ones that failed. What I Set Out to Build What I set out to build wasn't a specific tool or a specific agent. It was the design of the surface humans touch. The rule I settled on was just two lines. The only human entry points are Todoist (for dropping in things to do) and Discord (for conversation) Everything else gets pushed to the AI and scheduler side This is the opposite of "let's have AI do a ton of work." When people try to maximize what AI can do, they end up adding more tools. More tools means more settings screens, more places logs pile up, more places you have to go check "how's it doing now." Left unchecked, the number of automated processes and the number of places a human has to go look both grow together. So the thing I needed to decide first wasn't the scope of AI's work — it was the footprint on the human side. If you f