[cj]

When I was in college (10+ years ago) there was a system that allowed you to select your classes. During the selection period, certain people had priority (people a year above you got to select first).

Once a class was full, you could still get in if someone who was selected for the classes changed their mind, which (at an unpredictable time) would result in a seat becoming available in that class until another student noticed the availability and signed up.

So I wrote a simple PHP script that loaded the page every 60 seconds checking, and the script would send me a text message if any of the classes I wanted suddenly had an opening. I would then run to a computer and try to sign up.

These are the kind of bespoke, single-purpose things that I presume AI coding could help the average person with.

“Send me a push notification when the text on this webpage says the class isn’t full, and check every 60 seconds”

[mgkimsal]

This sort of thing needs to be built to be in-OS or in-device or whatever term we want to use to signify that the agent has to be me to do it. Scripting a browser that already has my saved credentials to do something for me, running in device, is where more things have to go, vs external third party services where we need to continually handle external auth protocols.

[thwarted]

> "Send me a push notification when the text on this webpage says the class isn’t full, and check every 60 seconds"

Yahoo Pipes. Definitely useful, definitely easier for some folks to string together basic operations into something more complex, but really ends up being for locally/personally consumed one-offs.