标签：#Automation

Most test automation tools look good during a demo. You record a login flow, add an assertion, run it in Chrome, and get a green result. Everyone is impressed. Then the real application gets involved. There are dynamic elements, delayed API responses, test accounts, verification emails, downloaded files, several deployment environments, and a checkout flow that behaves differently on Safari. A few months later, the original test suite has grown from 10 tests to 300. Some failures are product bugs. Others are test problems. A few only happen in CI. Nobody is completely sure which is which. That is when you discover whether you selected a test automation tool or merely a good demo. Creating tests is rarely the main problem When teams compare automation tools, they often begin with questions such as: How quickly can we record a test? Can AI generate the steps? Does it support plain-English instructions? Can a manual tester use it? Does it integrate with our CI pipeline? These are reasonable questions, but they mostly describe the beginning of an automation project. The harder questions appear later: Who updates the tests after a redesign? How do we investigate failures? Can another person understand a test created six months ago? What happens when the original automation engineer leaves? Can we test workflows that involve email, APIs, files, or mobile devices? How much infrastructure do we have to manage? Does the cost increase every time we run the regression suite? The first test tells you whether the tool works. The hundredth test tells you whether the approach works. Maintenance should be part of the evaluation A stable automated test is not a test that never changes. Applications are supposed to change. Buttons move. Components are replaced. Authentication flows evolve. APIs return different data. Product teams redesign entire sections of the interface. The objective is not to prevent tests from changing. It is to make those changes inexpensive and understandable.

Knowledge-and-Memory-Management v0.0.2 is out, delivering a clean release that prioritizes portability and modularity. This version shifts from hardcoded personal paths to $AGENT_HOME , making your knowledge pipelines reproducible across environments. If you’re building autonomous systems that need to ingest web content, video transcripts, or articles, this is the update you’ve been waiting for. The core design separates collection from memory management. The knowledge_collector module handles ingestion, while memory_manager handles storage, retrieval, and decay. The $AGENT_HOME environment variable anchors all runtime paths—no more hardcoded /home/user strings. Set it once, and your agents can carry their knowledge base anywhere. Knowledge Collection: Web, Video, Articles The collector supports three primary sources: Web : Scrapes and parses HTML, extracting body text and metadata. Handles rate limiting and retry logic. Video : Takes a YouTube URL, downloads captions (if available) or generates transcripts via Whisper integration. Articles : Parses RSS feeds or direct PDF links, chunking content by sections. All sources normalize into a KnowledgeEntry dict: {source, timestamp, content, embeddings} . The collector writes raw entries to $AGENT_HOME/knowledge/raw/ and passes them to the memory manager for processing. Memory Management with $AGENT_HOME The memory manager is where the clean release shines. Previous versions used os.path.expanduser("~/knowledge") , which broke across systems. v0.0.2 requires $AGENT_HOME to be set, then constructs all paths relative to it: $AGENT_HOME/memory/ stores persistent memories. $AGENT_HOME/knowledge/ holds raw and processed collections. $AGENT_HOME/config/ contains source definitions and memory decay rules. This design lets you ship a single agent.env file with AGENT_HOME=/opt/myagent or %AGENT_HOME%\data —no platform-specific configuration. The memory manager indexes entries by semantic embeddings (via a pluggable model provider

Smalltalk has excellent live environments, but managing the different VMs, images, and installers for Pharo, Cuis, Squeak, Glamorous Toolkit, GNU Smalltalk, etc. is painful. I made st — a lightweight shell-based CLI that gives one consistent interface: st pharo install && st pharo run st gt install , st cuis install , etc. Basic package search/install and eval support where available Works on Linux/macOS/Windows (WSL) Repo: https://github.com/hernanmd/st Happy to answer questions, take feedback, or hear what other Smalltalk pain points you'd like addressed. Contributions welcome (especially adding new dialects)!

Genkit Agents API, ORA, Python AI Explainer: New Tools for Workflow Automation Today's Highlights This week, Google's Genkit ships a powerful Agents API for TypeScript and Go, featuring human-in-the-loop capabilities for robust production deployments. Additionally, a new Go-based open-source task orchestrator, ORA, emerges for efficient model routing, alongside a practical Python tutorial for building an AI error explainer. Google's Genkit Ships Agents API with Detached Turns and Human-in-the-Loop for TypeScript and Go (InfoQ) Source: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/genkit-agents-api-preview/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=global Google has released a preview of its Genkit Agents API, significantly enhancing its open-source AI framework for building generative AI applications. This new API introduces features critical for deploying robust AI agents in production, specifically "Detached Turns" and "Human-in-the-Loop" functionalities. Detached Turns allow agents to operate asynchronously, handling long-running tasks or waiting for external events without blocking the main workflow, which is essential for complex, multi-step agentic processes. The Human-in-the-Loop feature provides crucial mechanisms for human oversight and intervention, ensuring reliability, safety, and compliance in critical applications where full automation is not yet feasible or desirable. The Genkit Agents API supports both TypeScript and Go, targeting a broad range of developers integrating AI into existing systems or building new agentic workflows. By offering structured patterns for agent interaction, state management, and human review, Genkit aims to streamline the development and deployment of intelligent agents, addressing key challenges in control and reliability for real-world AI applications. Comment: The introduction of Human-in-the-Loop into Genkit's Agents API is a game-changer for production-grade agent systems, offering the control and reliab

For a long time, teams treated browser test reliability as a framework problem. When tests failed, the usual response was to change selectors, add waits, increase retries, or replace one automation library with another. That approach made sense when the main challenge was simply controlling a browser. Modern applications are different. A single user journey may now include an identity provider, multi-factor authentication, a streaming AI response, a background API request, a feature flag, a canary deployment, and a frontend rendered differently across several operating systems. The test framework is still important, but it is only one part of the reliability problem. The bigger question is whether the entire testing system gives the team enough evidence to make a release decision. Headless failures are usually a symptom, not the real problem A common example is a test that passes locally but fails only in headless Chrome. It is tempting to assume that headless mode is simply unreliable. In practice, the difference is often caused by viewport size, rendering behavior, animation timing, fonts, resource loading, or elements being positioned differently when no visible browser window exists. This breakdown of why browser tests fail only in Chrome headless is useful because it separates several failure categories that are often grouped together as “timing issues.” That distinction matters. A test that fails because an element is outside the viewport needs a different fix from a test that fails because a network request completes later in CI. Adding a longer timeout may hide both problems temporarily, but it does not make the test more trustworthy. Retries can make a weak test suite look healthy Retries are one of the easiest ways to reduce visible failures in CI. They are also one of the easiest ways to hide instability. A flaky test that passes on its third attempt still consumed runner time, delayed feedback, created extra logs, and made it harder to determine whether

Everyone can generate a website now. Type a prompt, get a decent page — that part is a commodity. The question nobody's answering is what happens on day 2 : the leads start arriving, a line of copy needs a tweak, someone asks for a section you forgot. That's when a website stops being a design project and becomes a thing you have to run — and where most tools hand you yet another dashboard to log into and dread. Sitelas makes a different bet. Because a Sitelas site lives inside Claude through an MCP connector, the same chat that built the site also runs it . You don't open an admin panel to see who filled out your form, write back, or change the page. You just ask. Here's what "running your site from a chat" actually looks like. First, the 30-second why Claude connects to outside tools through MCP connectors — you already use the ones for Gmail, Calendar, and Drive. Sitelas has one too. Add it once (in claude.ai: Customize → Connectors → Add custom connector , and paste https://sitelas.com/api/mcp ), and Claude can do things with your site, not just talk about it: publish it, read its submissions, restyle it, add a section. Your site becomes an automation endpoint sitting next to your other connectors — the thing a Webflow or Squarespace site can't be. New here? Start with How to Build a Website From a Claude Chat . "Did anyone fill out my form today?" That single question is the whole idea. You ask; Claude reads your site's submissions, surfaces the new lead — Maya, a bakery owner — and drafts a warm reply in your voice. One message, no tabs. It works because every form on a Sitelas site captures submissions to your inbox automatically — no integration required. You can open that inbox in the dashboard any time: …but running your site from a chat means you rarely need to. Claude reads those same submissions straight from your site, so "who wrote in today, and what do they want?" is answered in the thread you're already in — not in a panel you have to remember to ch

If you have written more than a couple of scrapers, you already know the pattern. The first few hundred requests fly through. Then responses slow down, you start seeing 429 Too Many Requests , a captcha wall appears, and finally the target just returns empty pages or a hard 403 . Your code did not change. Your IP did. Scraping at any real volume is less about parsing HTML and more about managing where your requests come from. This post is a practical walk-through of how proxies fit into a scraping pipeline: why a single IP fails, what proxy types actually matter, how rotation works, and how to wire it all up in Python with requests , aiohttp , and Scrapy. There is code you can copy, plus the mistakes that cost me the most time. Why one IP is never enough Every site you scrape sees the same thing: a stream of requests from one address, arriving faster and more regularly than a human ever would. Anti-bot systems are built to spot exactly that. The signals they use are boring but effective: Request rate per IP. Too many hits in a short window trips a rate limiter. Volume over time. Even a slow scraper eventually stands out if every request comes from the same address for hours. Behavioral fingerprint. No mouse, no scroll, identical headers, requests in perfect intervals. Reputation. Datacenter ranges that have been abused before are pre-flagged. You can soften some of these with headers, delays, and a real browser, but there is a ceiling. Once a single IP has made enough requests, it gets throttled or blocked regardless of how polite you are. The only way past that ceiling is to spread requests across many addresses, so no single one crosses the threshold. That is the entire job of a proxy pool. The proxy landscape, minus the marketing Providers love to complicate this. For scraping, the distinctions that actually change your results are these: Shared vs private. Shared proxies are handed to many customers at once. You inherit everyone else's behavior, so an address ca

A scraper fails, someone swaps the User-Agent, someone else adds a proxy, then the job starts passing locally but fails again in CI. That usually happens because Cloudflare did not block “scraping” as one thing. It evaluated several signals, and each failure needs a different fix. This is about authorized automation: your own sites, customer-approved workflows, testing, monitoring, data access you are allowed to perform. If you do not have permission to automate against a site, changing fingerprints or rotating IPs does not make it okay. Start with the failure you actually see Cloudflare failures often get collapsed into “403”, but the page body matters. Common cases: Error 1020 : usually an access denied page from a Cloudflare rule or bot score decision. The HTTP status may still be 403, so inspect the HTML. 403 without a 1020 page : often IP reputation, firewall rules, geo restrictions, or an auth problem. 429 : rate limit exhaustion. Slowing down can help here, but it will not fix a fingerprint problem. Endless Just a moment... page : your client did not complete the browser-side challenge. CAPTCHA or Turnstile loop : Cloudflare still considers the session borderline after earlier checks. Add classification before you add workarounds. Even a basic classifier saves time: import time import requests CLOUDFLARE_MARKERS = { " 1020 " : " cloudflare_access_denied " , " Just a moment " : " cloudflare_js_challenge " , " cf-turnstile " : " cloudflare_turnstile " , " cf-error-code " : " cloudflare_error_page " , } def classify_response ( resp : requests . Response ) -> str : body = resp . text [: 5000 ] if resp . status_code == 429 : return " rate_limited " for marker , label in CLOUDFLARE_MARKERS . items (): if marker in body : return label if resp . status_code == 403 : return " forbidden_unknown " return " ok " if resp . ok else f " http_ { resp . status_code } " def get_with_backoff ( url : str , max_attempts = 4 ): for attempt in range ( max_attempts ): resp = request

A few weeks ago I was setting up a new project and needed to do the usual dance: create a Notion doc, spin up a Linear board, invite the team to Slack, and set up a couple of Zapier automations to connect them all. It took me most of an afternoon. That's when it hit me — I wasn't actually trying to "use" any of these tools. I just wanted the outcome. I wanted the project set up. And somewhere between the fifth Zapier trigger and the third failed webhook, I found myself thinking: why am I the one gluing all this together? That question is basically the whole thesis behind this post. AI agents aren't just a new feature category bolted onto SaaS. They're starting to eat the reason SaaS exists in the first place. The old deal: software rents you a workflow Traditional SaaS sells you a workflow, not an outcome. You pay for Notion, and Notion gives you a very nice, very rigid shape to pour your thoughts into. You pay for HubSpot, and it gives you a CRM shape. You pay for Zapier so you can awkwardly stitch the shapes together. This worked great for twenty years because the alternative was building everything yourself. SaaS was the shortcut. But the shortcut came with a tax: you had to adapt your work to fit the tool, and when you needed two tools to talk to each other, you had to become a part-time integrations engineer. The new deal: software does the workflow for you An AI agent flips that relationship. Instead of "here's a tool, go operate it," it's "here's the outcome, go figure out how to get there." You tell an agent "onboard this new client" and it can read the contract, create the folders, send the welcome email, schedule the kickoff call, and post a summary in Slack — using whatever tools it has access to, without you clicking through five different dashboards. That's the part that's easy to miss if you only think of agents as "chatbots with extra steps." A chatbot answers questions. An agent does multi-step work: It breaks a goal down into subtasks It calls tools

Most automation advice assumes you're willing to pay for Zapier or spend weeks learning n8n. The business-automation-architect skill by @1kalin takes a different angle: your AI agent is already capable of running workflows on its own, using cron jobs, scripts, and built-in reasoning. No third-party automation platform required. The Core Premise Your agent has access to APIs, file systems, schedulers, messaging channels, and web tools. That's everything you need to automate business processes without installing anything else. The skill teaches you to think like an automation architect — finding the highest-value processes to automate, designing the workflow, implementing it with agent tools, and measuring the return. The philosophy is grounded: only automate processes that happen at least five times per week OR cost more than thirty minutes per occurrence. Below that threshold, the automation overhead rarely pays off. The 5x5 Automation Audit The first phase is a structured discovery process. The skill provides a scoring matrix across five dimensions — frequency, time cost, error impact, complexity, and number of systems involved. Each dimension is scored 0-3, giving a maximum score of 15. Processes scoring 12 or above are immediate candidates. Those between 8-11 go into the next sprint. Anything below 8 is left manual. The discovery questions are worth asking directly: what breaks when someone is sick? Where do things pile up waiting for a person? What data gets copied between systems every day? These are the real automation opportunities, and they rarely show up in generic automation advice. Designing the Workflow The skill defines a clear workflow architecture template covering triggers, inputs, steps, error handling, outputs, and monitoring. The trigger types supported are schedule (cron), webhook, event, manual, email, and file-based. Steps can be fetch, transform, send, decide, wait, or notify — each mapping directly to what an agent can actually do. Error hand

In my last post I said that for normal HTML pages, element-based automation ( find / read_page ) beats coordinates every time. This post is about the apps where that advice is useless. Flutter Web apps. Canvas-rendered editors. Every button and panel you can see on screen doesn't exist in the DOM — it's all pixels painted onto a single canvas. find returns nothing. read_page 's accessibility tree is effectively empty. I got Claude to drive the Rive editor (an animation tool built with Flutter) all the way through selecting assets and exporting them. Here's the procedure that survived contact with reality. Step zero: confirm you're actually in this situation Coordinate automation is fragile, so you should only accept it after ruling out the alternative. The test is quick: run read_page . If the visible UI has almost no corresponding nodes, you're looking at a canvas-rendered app, and coordinates are the only interface you have. The four rules 1. Wait for the window size to settle before anything else Same failure mode as my previous post: right after load, the viewport hasn't reached its final width (I measured 1664→1920 over 2–3 seconds), and clicks based on an early screenshot land to the right of the target. Read innerWidth via javascript_tool twice; only proceed when two consecutive reads match. But matching innerWidth alone isn't enough — also confirm devicePixelRatio hasn't changed since the screenshot you're about to act on (a follow-up to my previous post surfaced this: when DPI or scaling changes, the whole coordinate space rescales the same way, but the new values stabilize immediately, so an innerWidth -only check can't catch it). Canvas apps deserve extra paranoia here, because there is no element-based fallback when a click misses. 2. Read text by zooming, not by extracting Text painted on canvas can't be pulled out of the DOM. To read a menu item or panel label, zoom into that region and read the enlarged screenshot as an image. Full-page screenshots ma

DoorDash RAG Architecture, AI Agent Mesh, & Open-Source Supply-Chain Scanner Today's Highlights This week, we explore advanced AI agent orchestration, a detailed production RAG architecture, and an open-source tool for supply-chain security auditing. These stories provide practical insights into deploying and managing AI frameworks in real-world workflows. How DoorDash Built an AI Shopping Assistant That Doesn’t Rely on the LLM Alone (InfoQ) Source: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/doordash-ai-ask-assistant/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=global This article from InfoQ delves into the intricate architecture behind DoorDash's "Ask DoorDash" AI-powered shopping assistant. Unlike many solutions that solely depend on large language models, DoorDash's approach integrates an LLM with a complex retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system and a comprehensive intent classification pipeline. This multi-layered framework ensures accuracy and relevance, particularly for tasks like recommending specific items or answering detailed product queries within their extensive catalog. The system also employs sophisticated filtering and ranking mechanisms to refine results, moving beyond simple keyword matching to provide highly personalized and context-aware suggestions. The technical deep-dive covers how DoorDash engineered this system to handle the nuances of user intent and data retrieval efficiently in a production environment. Key aspects include leveraging structured and unstructured data sources, managing latency for real-time interactions, and implementing robust feedback loops for continuous improvement. The article offers valuable insights into building scalable, reliable AI assistants that can augment LLMs with proprietary data and business logic, providing a blueprint for enterprises looking to deploy similar advanced applied AI solutions. Comment: This provides a fantastic real-world case study for augmenting LLMs with custom RAG and

TL;DR Some things can't be checked with a number, like whether an animation feels right. So a second, read-only agent grades the first one against a written rubric it is not allowed to edit. In my run the reviewer rejected the builder three times, and the most interesting problem it caught was in the test evidence, not the code. In Part 1 I built a loop that chased a number, frames per second. But most of what we care about in software is not a number. "Does this region switch feel good?" has no assert. You cannot write expect(feelsRight).toBe(true) . So this part is about how you check quality when there is nothing to measure. The approach I used is a second agent that grades the first one against a written rubric. In my run the reviewer turned the builder down three times before it approved anything, and the most interesting problem it found was not in the code at all. A quick reminder of the definition, since this is Part 2 of 3: a loop is an external script that runs the agent, a separate check the agent cannot edit decides pass or fail, and it repeats until it passes or hits a limit. In Part 1 the check was a Playwright test. Here the check is another agent. The problem this loop solves In the browser you can switch regions, say from Tamil to Korean, which swaps out hundreds of posters at once. Done badly, the grid flashes blank and jumps around. Done well, it fades from one set to the next, keeps its layout, shows a loading state, and puts you back at the top. "Done well" is subjective, which is the kind of thing you cannot unit-test. So I wrote it down as a rubric and had a second agent apply it. The bar: a rubric a person owns The rubric is seven plain-English checks in a file, and the first line is the one that matters: Overall APPROVED requires every item PASS. This file is human-owned. Only a person changes the bar. The seven items are things like a crossfade instead of a flash, no layout shift, a visible loading state, posters that stay 2:3, and landing

TL;DR A "loop" is not an agent grading its own work. It is an external script that re-runs the agent, plus a separate check the agent cannot edit. I turned "feels smooth" into an FPS number and let the loop optimize toward it. I set the target too high to be reachable on a 60Hz screen. The loop kept failing but never faked the result. The bug was in my number, not the code. Could I get an AI agent to make my website faster without me sitting there, running it, reading the numbers, and running it again? That is what this series is about. Not how I built a website, because the website is boring on purpose, but how you wrap an agent in a loop that works toward a goal on its own, and how you stop it from cheating along the way. In this first part I want to explain what a loop actually is, because there is a common misconception, and then walk through a real one. I set this loop a target that was physically impossible to reach and watched what it did. That run taught me more than a passing test would have. This is Part 1 of 3. All three parts use the same small movie-poster website as the example, but the website is never the point. What a loop is, and what it is not I had a wrong idea about this at first, so let me clear it up. A loop is not an agent prompting itself, grading its own work, and deciding when it is done. An agent left to mark its own homework will usually tell you it passed. A loop is closer to this: an external script runs the agent, a separate check that the agent cannot edit decides whether the result is good, and that repeats until the check passes or you hit a limit. There are three parts to it that come up again and again: The driver: the script that re-runs the agent. This is the thing that removes the manual work, not the agent. The gate: the check that decides pass or fail. The agent makes changes, but it never decides when to stop. The cap: a limit, so a stuck loop gives up instead of running forever. One rule matters more than the rest. The thi

TL;DR This loop runs on a schedule and succeeds by doing nothing almost every night. The pass/fail check is plain deterministic code, with no AI in the decision. It can run entirely free on your own machine. Only the cloud/CI version needs a paid API key. Plus the one bug that broke all three loops. The first two loops in this series work the same way from your side: you start them and watch. This last one runs on a schedule, like a nightly job, while you are not looking. That changes what success even means. A scheduled maintenance loop is doing its job when it does nothing. It should run every night, find nothing wrong, cost almost nothing, and still be there on the night something actually breaks. This part covers that loop, the hook mechanism that the whole series relies on, and a bug that broke all three loops in the least convenient place possible. The definition one more time, since this is Part 3 of 3: a loop is a trigger that runs the agent, a check the agent cannot edit that decides pass or fail, and a repeat, or here a wait until the next run. The only new thing this time is the trigger. A timer starts it instead of you. The problem this loop solves The browser's poster data is baked ahead of time into JSON files and images. In a real deployment that data goes stale as films are added and metadata changes, so you want to regenerate it every so often and confirm it is still valid before it ships: on a timer -> regenerate the data -> validate it -> green ships, red shouts The gate: a plain check with no model in it The check is a Node script. For every region file it confirms three things and exits non-zero if any of them fail: it matches the expected JSON schema, it has at least the minimum film count, and every poster file it points to actually exists on disk. There is no language model in that list. The regeneration step might use Claude, but the decision about whether the data is good is plain, deterministic code. That is on purpose. You do not want the

Most people think building an AI voice agent means writing a clever prompt. I build these for a living, and I can tell you the prompt is maybe an hour of the work. The other week disappears into two places: wiring up everything the agent touches, and testing it against the twenty ways a real caller will break it. So I built a pipeline that points one AI coding tool at each of those problems. Claude Code generates and wires the agent from a spec. Comet, an AI browser automation tool, runs it through dozens of messy call scenarios before a human ever picks up the phone. This post is how that loop actually works, and where it still needs me. Why the build loop is slow (and it is not the prompt) When you picture building a voice agent, you picture the prompt. That is the easy part. The slow part is everything around it. A production agent for, say, a car garage is not one artifact. It is a conversation flow, a set of custom functions that hit your automation layer, calendar and CRM wiring, a telephony number with A2P registration, and a pile of edge-case handling that only shows up when someone calls in angry with a dog barking in the background. The reason it is slow is not typing. It is the round trips. You build a version, you call it, it fumbles when the caller interrupts or asks something off-script, you fix one thing, you call it again. Each loop is a few minutes of manual dialing and listening. Multiply that by the fifty scenarios a real agent needs to survive and you have burned a week. The pipeline exists to kill those round trips. Half one: Claude Code builds the agent from a spec The first insight is that most of what goes into a voice agent is structured and repetitive, which is exactly what an AI coding tool is good at. I do not hand-write every custom function and every n8n node from scratch for each new client. I write a spec, and I let Claude Code turn that spec into concrete artifacts. The spec is a plain description of the vertical and the business: wh

A hands-on comparison where I tested BrowserAct and Agent Browser using the SannySoft browser...

This is Part 1 of a 5-part series on Cisco EEM. We start here with the fundamentals and a few working applets, then build toward self-healing networks, automated diagnostics, compliance guardrails, and a complete real-world deployment. Ask ten network engineers what they use EEM for, and nine will say the same thing: "Oh, I have an applet that auto-recovers err-disabled ports." Then they never touch it again. That's a shame, because Embedded Event Manager is one of the most capable tools already sitting inside every Cisco IOS device you own — and almost nobody uses more than 1% of it. It's a full automation engine that lives on the box . No external server. No API gateway. No orchestration platform. Just the router or switch, watching itself, ready to react the instant something happens — even if the WAN is cut, the NMS is down, and it's three in the morning. This series is about using that other 99%. By the end you'll have a toolkit of applets you can deploy and, more importantly, a way of thinking about on-box automation. But we start at the foundation: what EEM actually is, how it's put together, and why "on the box" is a bigger deal than it sounds. What EEM actually is Embedded Event Manager is an event-driven automation framework built into Cisco IOS, IOS-XE, and NX-OS. Strip away the jargon and it's a very simple idea: When something happens, do something about it — automatically, on the device itself. That "something happens" is an event . That "do something" is one or more actions . Bundle an event with its actions and you have an applet — the basic unit of EEM. That's the whole model. The power comes from how many different things can be an event , and how much an action can do. Events EEM can watch for include: A syslog message matching a pattern (an interface flapping, an HSRP state change, a config being saved). An SNMP OID crossing a threshold (CPU over 85%, a power supply going absent, temperature rising). A CLI command being entered (someone typing wr

Field-service software has an adoption problem: drivers won't use it. Heavy app, another login, crashes in low-signal areas. So the "real-time" data still shows up as end-of-shift phone calls. The fix that actually sticks: stop building an app and use the one drivers already live in — WhatsApp. With Apps Script and Google Sheets behind it, WhatsApp becomes a frictionless mobile ERP. Here's the build. WhatsApp as a data-entry terminal A driver texts Status ABC-1234 Delivered . An Apps Script doPost webhook receives it, parses it, and updates the Sheet in real time. Latency goes from hours to milliseconds — and there's nothing to install, so adoption hits 90%+ in a week (vs. 50–70% for custom apps). Two-stage parsing for messy input Real drivers type "done," not clean commands. So: Regex first pass — handles ~70% of messages (clean format) instantly and for free. LLM fallback — the remaining ~30% goes to a cheap model (GPT-4o-mini / Gemini Flash) with the known cargo IDs and valid statuses. It returns normalized JSON + a confidence score. Below-threshold messages surface to a dispatcher. The LLM normalizes correctly 95%+ of the time (~5% manual), and it handles multilingual input with zero extra code. Driver msg → Apps Script doPost → regex pass → (fail) LLM fallback w/ confidence score → Sheet update (timestamp + raw-message log) → optional outbound (route change, POD photo request) Why Google Sheets is the right backend Dependent formulas: time-to-delivery, SLA-breach flags Pivot tables for reporting Apps Script triggers for automatic client emails Conditional formatting dashboards Native Calendar / Maps / Drive integration (POD photos → Drive folder) It runs on free Google Workspace infrastructure with minimal API cost. Bidirectional by default The same integration pushes messages back to drivers: route changes, delivery instructions, shift reminders, exception alerts, proof-of-delivery photo requests — all in the same thread. Pitfalls that get your number banned T

Honestly, this wasn't supposed to become a project. There are already a few AI desktop assistants built around Rofi. They work, but they usually cover just one or two pieces of the puzzle. I wanted something that actually felt complete. So I kept adding things. Localization. TTS. Natural voices. Dark mode. Better prompts. Better UX. A lot of boring fixes that nobody notices until they're missing. I use it every single day, so if something breaks, it annoys me first. That's probably why it's been surprisingly stable. Where the idea actually came from My mom uses it too. That's actually where the whole idea came from. Her computer isn't exactly powerful, so I switched her to Linux. The problem is... Linux can be confusing when you're not into computers. And I can't always be around to help. Now she just asks Lumina instead of calling me. That alone made the project worth building. Publishing it on GitHub was kind of an afterthought. I figured maybe someone else is in the same situation, or maybe someone is trying Linux for the first time and wants something that makes the desktop feel a bit less intimidating. Why Rofi and not Eww One thing I wanted from day one was to keep everything native. That's why it's built on Rofi. I could've used Eww, but I didn't really want another layer running in the background just to draw a prettier window. Rofi is already insanely fast. I just kept pushing it until it did what I needed. Turns out, Rofi is capable of way more than people usually think. Code's up at github.com/Rafacuy/desklumina if you're curious how it's put together.