Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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At work, I have my Claude set up to go through the issue tracker, source control, dashboards, team Slack channels, calendar appointments, and have it look for things like upcoming scheduling issues and deadlines that might get tough. A lot of those services need a corporate VPN or access to my local machine for the LLM to get the information right.

Nothing I can't do myself (and generally I do keep an eye on that sort of thing), but it did catch a holiday for my foreign team members that seemed to have gone unnoticed, and remarked about a status mismatch between Jira and source control that made the dashboard misrepresent progress. It's not much, but it's an extra little check that works quite well.

Another trick I'm experimenting with is having Claude rebase my open PRs waiting for review every day, and auto-solving conflicts when they arise. I don't trust it enough to let it push code to the repository, but I think I have the prompt set up in such a way that I might soon start using it.

While not trying to recreate the infamous dropbox comment - if you already have Claude code, are on Linux - can't Claude write a cronjob/systemd task that invokes itself for you?

I could write a program that does this of course, but interpreting the current state of Slack threads is not something a Python script will be able to do without involving another LLM. I automated and script what I need or want to automate and script already, but for things like this where understanding of language is useful, I leave it to the slop machine.

Things like "this is a holiday in country X but only for people living in province Y except for in town Z" are massive pain to script. Plus, if the issue tracker and source control automation were working correctly, I wouldn't need to read the status of both to get a good understanding of the situation. Any time scripting there should probably be spent (by someone else) on fixing the problem in the first place.

When Claude eventually doubles or triples the token cost to stop hemorrhaging money, I'm going to lose these scripts and I won't be upset about it in the least. But until then, my "somewhat understanding of context" script-but-not-really setup is proving quite useful.

I meant more like:

    0 8 * * 1-5 claude -p "Fetch my unread emails from the last 24 hours, identify urgent items, and provide a bulleted summary." >> ~/desktop/daily_email_summary.txt

(Courtesy of Gemini, not Claude code, as I'm on my phone).

Now, obviously - you might want something a little more elegant; but my point was that if you already grant Claude tool access to your email, slack etc - then it should be trivial to wrap it in a script, and run that from Cron.

I wouldn't do that; I don't trust Claude code with access to my mail (nor would I trust Claude desktop - but I don't use it anyway).

But, if you do trust Claude to read your slack and email, I don't see why Claude code couldn't do this for you almost out of the box?

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