The machine that runs my todo list while I sleep
A headless Mac Mini, a cron job every fifteen minutes, and a timeline of what it actually did.
A headless Mac Mini in a closet runs a cron job every fifteen minutes. Things 3 holds my task list, an LLM reasons about it, iMessage carries results to my phone, and none of it waits for me to be at my desk. I built it because manually triaging a backlog is slow and repetitive in exactly the way computers are supposed to handle. Things 3 has no API, so everything routes through AppleScript; the model reads current state, applies whatever context I've given it about priorities, and reorders, flags, or passes through unchanged. Most runs change nothing, and that's fine — the value isn't constant churn, it's not having to remember to check. I want a timeline scrubber next: a local interface that plays the day's automation back like a video, one cron run per frame, so I can see what the model saw at 9:15 and whether noon matched what I expected. Right now I read logs, which are fine but don't tell me whether the system is making decisions or just confirming the status quo. Nothing here is exotic — the intelligence is knowing what 'urgent' means relative to everything else on the list. What changes with an autonomous system is pressure: nothing depends on me checking in, and some days a task I'd have forgotten surfaces before it matters.