Automation

There’s an agent design pattern with an uncomfortable premise: the agent is the orchestrator, and you are one of its tools. It goes by a few names — human-as-a-tool, human-as-tool, sometimes lumped under “human-in-the-loop.” But it’s worth separating the two, because the inversion is the whole point. Human-in-the-loop vs. human-as-a-tool Human-in-the-loop keeps the human in charge. The agent proposes, the human approves. You’re the supervisor signing off on the intern’s work before it ships....

You probably think of GitHub Actions as a CI tool: push code, run tests, deploy. But strip away the CI framing and what’s left is something more interesting — a free virtual machine that boots on a cron schedule, runs whatever you want, and shuts down. No VPS bill. No Raspberry Pi humming in a closet. No “did my home server lose power again?” Every scheduled run gets a fresh Ubuntu VM with 4 vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM, Python, Node, Docker, and internet access....