Comment by TeMPOraL

This is a larger topic that's worthy of a comparably large rant, which I really don't want to do right now, but to keep it short, in my subjective view:

- IFTTT was great when it started; at some point, it became... weird, in a "I don't even know what's going on on my screen, is this a poster or an app" kind of way.

- Zapier is an unpenetrable mess, evidently targets marketers and other business users; discovery is hard, and even though it seems like it has everything, it - like all tools in this space - is always missing the one feature you actually need.

- Yahoo Pipes, I heard they were great, but I only learned about them after they shut down.

- Apple Shortcuts - not sure what you can do with those, but over the years of reading about them in HN comments, I think they may be the exception here, in being both targeting regular users and actually useful.

- Samsung Modes and Routines - only recently becoming remotely useful, so that's nice, even if vendor-restricted.

- Tasker - an Android tool that actually manages to offer useful automation, despite the entire platform/OS and app ecosystem trying its best to prevent it. Which is great, if your main computer is a phone. It sucks in a world of cloud/SaaS, because it creates a silly situation where e.g. I could nicely automate some things involving e-mail and calendars from Tasker + FairEmail, but... well my mailboxes and calendars lives in the cloud so some of that would conflict with use of vendor (Fastmail) webapp or any other tool.

Or, in short: we need Tasker but for web (and without some of the legacy baggage around UI and variable handling).

The sorry state of automation is not entirely, or even mostly, the fault of the automation platforms. I may have issues with some UI and business choices some of these platforms made, but really, the main issue is that integrations are business deals and the integrated sides quickly learned to provide only a limited set of features - never enough to allow users to actually automate use of some product. There's always some features missing. You can read data but not write it. You can read files and create new files but not edit or delete them. You can add new tasks but can't get a list of existing ones. Etc.

It's another reason LLMs are such a great thing to happen - they make it easy (for now) to force interoperability between parties that desperately want to prevent it. After all, worst case, I can have the LLM operate the vendor site through a browser, pretending to be a human. Not very reliable, but much better than nothing at all.

Honestly, you just need cron (and Ruby/Python/bash/whatever) on an EC2. It's not very fashionable, but it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything.

I'd start with solving the UX issues, specifically expectations and UI around scheduling jobs.

Expectations - the functionality of "do X on a timer" needs to be offered to users as a proper end-user feature[0], not treated as a sysadmin feature (Windows, Linux) or not provided at all (Android). People start seeing it on their own devices, they'll start using it, then expecting it, and the web will adjust too[1].

UI - somehow this escapes every existing solution, from `cron` through Windows timers to any web "on timer" event trigger in any platform ever. There already exists a very powerful UI paradigm for managing recurring tasks, that most normies know how to use, because they're already using it daily at work and privately: a calendar. Yes, that thing where we can set and manage recurring events, and see them at a glance, in context of everything else that's going on in our lives.

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<rant>

I know those are hard problems, but are hard mostly because everybody wants to be the fucking one platform owning users and the universe. This self-inflicted sickness in computing is precisely why people will jump at AI solutions for this. Why I too will jump on this: because it's easier than dealing with all the systems and platforms that don't want to cooperate.

After all, at this point, the easiest solution to the problems I listed above, and several others in this space, would be to get an AI agent that I can:

1) Run on a cron every 30 minutes or so (events are too complicated);

2) Give it read (at minimum) access to my calendar and todo lists (the ones I use, but I'm willing to compromise here);

3) Give it access to other useful tools

Which I guess brings us to the actual root problem here. "Run tasks on a cron" and "run tasks on trigger" are basically just another way of saying unattended/non-interactive usage. That is what is constantly being denied end users.

This is also the key to enabling most value of AI tools, too, and people understand it very well (see the popularity of that Open Claw thing as the most recent example), but the industry also lives in denial, believing that "lethal trifecta" is a thing that can be solved.

</rant>

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[0] - This extends to event triggers ("if X happens, then") automation, and end-user automation in all of every-day life. I mean, it's beyond ridiculous that the only things normal people are allowed to run automatically are dishwasher, and a laundry machine (and in the previous era, VCRs).

[1] - As a side effect, it would quickly debullshitify "smart home" / "internet of things" spaces a lot. The whole consumer side of the market revolves around selling people basic automation capabilities - except vendor-locked, and without the most useful parts.