My phone’s power button is broken.
Redmi Note 11, been my daily driver for over a year. One day the power button just stopped responding. Dead. Panic? A little. But mostly annoyed because I knew it wasn’t a software issue.
Normal solution: take it to a service center. My solution: plug it into my laptop, run fastboot reboot from the terminal.
Yes, I turn on my phone using my laptop. Every time it dies. That’s where it started.
Unplanned Escalation
That got me thinking: if I can automate something this absurd, what else can I do?
I’d been using Hermes Agent (an AI assistant from Nous Research) for coding help. Turns out it can do way more than that.
Now I have:
Morning Briefing at 7 AM every day. Every morning when I wake up, there’s already a summary waiting: relevant tech news, Bekasi weather, and today’s task reminders. No need to scroll Twitter or open 5 different apps.
Weekly Engineering Review every Monday night. It scans all my GitHub repos, checks recent commits, identifies stagnant projects, and delivers an honest summary of my weekly progress. More brutal than my thesis advisor.
Monthly Portfolio Audit. On the 1st of every month, it audits my portfolio from a Data/AI Engineer recruiter’s perspective. What’s missing, what could improve, what’s outdated. Feedback I need but am too lazy to seek out myself.
Security Scan every Friday. Scans my public repos for exposed secrets, vulnerable dependencies, or files that shouldn’t have been pushed.
This Isn’t a Hustle Culture Story
Let me be clear: this isn’t about insane productivity or “grinding 24/7.” It’s actually the opposite.
I automated the things that make me lazy. Things I should do but always postpone. Weekly reviews? Lazy. Security checks? Lazy. Reading morning news? Just mindless scrolling.
Now those things happen without me thinking about them. And the results are more consistent than when I do them manually. Because machines don’t get lazy. Machines don’t procrastinate.
What Can’t Be Automated
But I also learned the limits.
AI can’t decide for me. It can summarize, offer options, give warnings. But decisions stay in my hands. Which freelance project to take. What to prioritize learning this week. Whether to continue or stop at a repo.
Automation is a copilot, not autopilot. The difference matters.
One Thing That Changed
What changed most wasn’t efficiency or speed. It was awareness.
Before, I didn’t know the real state of my repos. Didn’t know which ones hadn’t been touched in a month. Didn’t know which dependencies had expired. Now I know. Every week. Without effort.
And that turned out to be what made me more focused. Not because I’m chased by automated deadlines, but because I became aware of what actually matters and what’s just “later.”
My phone’s power button is still broken, by the way. But now I have an assistant that turns it on.