Blackbox, or bb, is the secretary I built for myself at the end of September. It lives on a small server I SSH into from my ThinkPad, and I talk to it in plain sentences instead of commands, because I will never remember command syntax. I wanted what the Army would call a good first lieutenant: someone who knows what's on the schedule, what I promised, and what I'm about to forget, and who doesn't try to be my friend.
The days start with bb good morning. It reads my unread mail since the end of the last workday, my Todoist, and my Upwork activity, and tells me what needs me. Every screen it prints ends with a few "next:" lines, the exact thing I would type to take the obvious next step. That small feature has done more for me than anything else in it. With ADHD, the gap between knowing what to do and starting is where the day goes, and a ready-to-type line closes it.
The Upwork side grew fastest. Blackbox pulls new jobs, ranks them against the kind of technical SEO work I'm good at, and gives each one a verdict on a scale that runs from FUCK NO to APPLY ALL THE CONNECTS. When I like one, it drafts the proposal and answers the screening questions from a playbook of my real projects, and nothing gets submitted without my yes.
The most important thing I learned came from watching myself use it. I type a command and move on without checking whether it worked. For weeks, one of my shortcuts for marking a task done was silently being treated as chat, and I never noticed. Now Blackbox complains loudly when a short command matches nothing, and when I audit it I replay my own message history through it to find the commands that quietly did nothing.
The diary is the part I'd keep if I lost the rest. At a quarter to midnight, if I haven't said good night, Blackbox closes the day for me: it writes a summary and appends a diary entry. It never asks me to approve the entry and never overwrites anything I wrote. For a person who can't replay his own week, that file is the week.
Next on the list are a blind bake-off to pick which model handles which job, model help for the loose sentences that don't match any command, and eventually a public version, working name Adjutant, with the patterns written up for anyone who wants to take them.