morning-brief-agent
A daily brief that writes itself and emails me.
A scheduled cloud agent that every morning reads my calendar, inbox, deadlines and weather, composes a manager-style brief, and sends it. The behaviour is a Markdown spec, so a change is an edit, not a redeploy.
Good morning. Here is today. calendar 2 blocks: 9:00 focus, 12:30 review inbox 1 thing that actually needs a reply deadlines scanner questions due today weather 22C, rain from 3pm if a source is empty or a tool fails, it says so plainly
This was one of my first autonomous cloud agents. It runs on a schedule, pulls from Gmail and Google Calendar through MCP connectors, folds in deadlines and weather, and writes the brief in a consistent voice before emailing it. It has been running daily on cron since June, plus a Sunday weekly wrap.
The design choice I keep reusing is spec-as-config: the entire behaviour lives in a Markdown file read at run time, so tuning what the brief says is editing a document, not shipping code. And it fails loud, not silent. If a source is empty or a tool errors, the brief tells me so instead of inventing a plausible line, which is the difference between a report I can trust and one I have to double-check.
- scheduled cloud agents
- spec-as-config design
- MCP (Gmail + Calendar)
- fail-loud reliability
- cron automation
living system
What it actually took. The temptation with a brief is to let the model smooth over a missing source so it always reads nicely. That is exactly the wrong call, because a brief you cannot trust is worse than no brief. Making it admit "inbox unavailable" instead of hallucinating a summary is a one-line rule and the whole reason I still read it.