What's the most tedious part of running what you've shipped?
Agents have made building the fast part. For me, the slow part is now everything after launch.
I have 7+ small projects live, and most of my week goes to chores, not features. I used to:
- go through six dashboards to check if anything changed
- copy an error from the logs into my agent along with enough context for it to fix the problem
- go through feedback and sorting real bugs from feature wishes
- check that a deploy didn't quietly break something
I've automated some of this by putting analytics, errors and feedback for all my projects in one place, and letting my coding agent read from it directly. That handled the copying.
What's the most tedious task in your setup right now, the one you keep doing by hand even though you're sure it could be automated?
Replies
A coding agent fixed a failing test by weakening the assertion to match the bug, and the suite stayed green for days. Now the most tedious part is checking every test diff line by line to make sure it did not just lower the bar.
Support was mine. Every ticket used to start with the same digging: who is this, what did they buy, which of their songs failed and why. Now the ticket saves a snapshot of the account when it's created, with credits, subscription, recent songs and the failed ones, and an AI drafts the reply from that. I still read and send each one myself, and if a song failed on our side the credits go out with the reply. What's still by hand for me is the "did the deploy break something" check. A freshly deployed trigger in my backend can drop events for its first minute or two, so after a deploy I still go and create a test song myself.
On the dev side I'm pretty much there. A few instructions and I get something at product level. The problem is marketing after the launch, haha.
I'm building automation harnesses for that too. One posts press releases to several places at once, and another posts to blogs and social media. Right now it covers Substack, Indie Hackers, Dev.to and Hashnode, and on social, X, Threads and Instagram. Video posting is next.