Questions tagged [automation]
Post a PromptPrompts that automate workflows and chores.
11 prompts
42votes
1answers
5.9kviews
Prompt to turn a rambling meeting transcript into decisions, owners, and open questions
I was drowning in transcript summaries that were just shorter transcripts. "The team discussed X. Then they discussed Y." No signal. I switched to a prompt that extracts only three things and forces a
28votes
0answers
4.2kviews
One prompt for a polite, resumable web scraper that won't get me IP-banned
I needed to pull a few thousand product pages for a price-history side project. My first scraper hammered the site with 50 concurrent requests, got a 429, then kept retrying instantly and made it wors
23votes
2answers
2.9kviews
Prompt for a log-tailing CLI that parses, filters, and summarizes without loading the whole file
I wanted a small tool to slice gigabyte-sized JSON-lines logs by level and time range and print a summary, but the first version the model gave me did open(f).read() and json.loads on the whole thing,
18votes
2answers
3.1kviews
Prompt for a production-grade Python CLI with argparse, exit codes, and a self-check
Every weekend project starts with me asking a model for "a Python script that does X" and getting back a 20-line toy: no argument parsing, prints stack traces at users, returns 0 even when it failed.
26votes
1answers
2.2kviews
Prompt for a pandas cleaning script that validates the schema before it trusts the CSV
I get monthly CSV exports from a vendor and the columns silently drift: a header gets renamed, a numeric column arrives with stray $ and commas, dates flip between MM/DD and DD/MM. My old script assum
19votes
1answers
2.7kviews
Getting the model to write actually safe bash instead of a footgun with set -e
I kept getting shell scripts that looked fine and then nuked a directory because an unset variable expanded to empty and rm -rf "$DIR/" became rm -rf /. Adding set -e alone is a trap: it silently does
12votes
0answers
1.4kviews
Prompt for a changelog that a non-engineer can actually read, grouped by impact
Our raw changelog was just squashed commit subjects. Customers ignored it because it was 40 lines of refactor(api): ... that meant nothing to them. I now generate two changelogs from the same merged P
24votes
2answers
3.0kviews
Prompt that writes the migration AND a reversible down-migration, not just the ALTER
Models are great at spitting out ALTER TABLE statements and terrible at remembering that migrations run on live data with existing rows. I got burned adding a NOT NULL column with no default to a tabl
16votes
1answers
1.9kviews
Prompt for commit messages that explain WHY, generated from a diff
My commit history was a graveyard of "fix", "update", "wip". Reviewing my own PRs a month later was archaeology. I wired a prompt into a pre-commit hook that reads the staged diff and drafts a Convent
10votes
3answers
2.0kviews
Prompt for an idempotent cron/systemd maintenance script that's safe to run twice
Our nightly cleanup job used to assume it ran exactly once and finished. Then a run overlapped with the next one, they both deleted the same temp files, and one crashed mid-way leaving a half-cleaned
13votes
0answers
1.5kviews
Making the model generate a config loader with validation instead of raw os.environ reads
Half our incidents traced back to config: an env var typo'd to an empty string, a port that was actually the literal text "8080" compared against an int, a feature flag that was the string "false" (wh