The Build, Ep. 4: September, The Agent Got a Voice and a Slack Handle

ByDevin

The Build is the story of one guy, two Macs and too many agents, told as it happens. Episodes 1–6 catch up from May to tonight. After that it’s one entry a night.

September was 750 commits in four weeks. This is the month the agent stopped being a script runner and started showing up where I already am.

It moved into Slack

  • 2 Sep: the Slack bridge. I tag @Bru Bot in a channel, and a Claude session on the home Mac answers in the thread with full local context: files, logs, the crontab.
  • Same day I found scheduler number three, hiding in a folder of “scheduled tasks” that the two-Mac split never saw.

It moved onto my phone

  • 5–7 Sep: a Life OS iPhone app with Face ID and push notifications. I rejected the desktop look twice and went native iOS. Lesson: stop fighting the platform.
  • 7 Sep: one-time login codes now go iPhone Shortcut → cloud inbox → agent. Forwarding texts to the Mac died completely on 9 Sep, so this was just in time.
  • 1 Sep: every UI change now goes through Claude Design, so the design lives in one place and not in my head.

It got a voice

  • 25 Sep: Jessica went live: an AI voice agent that calls me once a day at 10:00 from the home Mac. On the 5th of October she started making calls for me, too.
  • 24 Sep: my first agents in a separate agent app, each one with a job and a name.
  • 18 Sep: grocery carts filled headlessly. I say what we need, a cart appears, I pay.

It got cheaper (and pickier)

  • 23 Sep: a hybrid model policy. Cheap models for bulk work; Opus 5.5 for anything personal: my advisor, my briefs.
  • 25 Sep: Fable got banned from the stack. Opus 5.5 is the top tier: really good quality at a really good price.
models

Lessons from the trenches

  • 13 Sep: the home Mac doesn’t log itself back in after a reboot, and until it does every LaunchAgent is dead. Uptime starts with the boring stuff.
  • 14 Sep: the Day Score became a formula in code. The LLM only grades the nine domains, and arithmetic does the rest.
  • 17 Sep: a log file’s timestamp doesn’t prove the job ran. A dead job’s log freezes at its last failure, and from the outside healthy and dead look exactly alike.

The Build: catch-up series

From Ep. 7 it’s one short entry a night.

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