Accidentally Discovered GitHub Can Run My Code (For Free)

Today I discovered GitHub can run my Python scripts automatically, on schedule, for free. A few hours ago I didn't even know GitHub Actions existed. Now I have a fully automated newsletter digest publishing to a webpage every week. This is exactly the kind of rabbit hole that reminds me why I love this moment in tech.

It started innocently enough. I was helping a friend use this email newsletter summarization tool I'd built. Well, more accurately, I used AI to build it. I have a rough relationship with email. I subscribe to a bunch of amazing newsletters and then I don't read them. At all. So I wrote a Python script that looks at my email, finds all the ones labeled "AI newsletter," and summarizes them in bulk. Not individual emails, but everything together, showing me the five most important things. That's one of the ways I follow the space.

I'd been running this locally, looking at the generated markdown file, occasionally sharing it with others who found it useful. My friend wanted to use it, so there we were, setting it up, trying to figure out how to make it a webpage instead of a markdown file so it worked better for his workflow. We were going to push the summaries to github and then he could comfortably view them from github's pages product that essentially makes a website out of a github repository.

Later when I was reimplementing some of the ideas on my own repo in Claude Code, in setting up the report templating for view on the web, I see something scroll by that looks like cron settings. (Cron is a unix tool for scheduling jobs to run on their own.) I stopped. I scrolled back.

Wait, what?

Hey Claude. Does this <copy-paste of cron settings> mean that I can have github run this script on a schedule?

Shut the front door!

The Tinkerer's Curse (Or Blessing)

You can essentially automate and schedule tasks to run on GitHub's servers. My script could live on GitHub, run every week automatically, and publish to a GitHub webpage. No server setup. No hosting costs. No maintenance.

Want to see what it builds? Here's the automated newsletter digest. Every Sunday at 10 AM UTC, this updates itself with the five most important things from my AI newsletter subscriptions. No intervention needed.

I spent the next hour and a half debugging, refining, implementing. Over an hour to automate something that takes 5 or 10 minutes manually. I'd like to say it's just math and it's only a few weeks before that investment is worth it. But really, I just can't tolerate the alternative.

This is who I've always been. I will happily spend an hour and a half to avoid 20 minutes of boring work. Now I try to lean into that, particularly when I have to do that boring work repeatedly. But on day one, it always seems like an indulgence.

When I think of the pleasure of solving a problem properly, I always think of this thing from over 20 years ago.

The Pattern I Can't Shake

The example I always give people is this odd little thing from decades ago. I started my career working as a software engineer. I worked for MajorLeagueBaseball.com at the very beginning. And showing my years here, it was a Java shop. When you deployed code, you needed to compile the Java into class files, then copy all those files maintaining the exact directory structure. We had no tools for this. We would literally manually create the directories. Every. Single. Time.

Tedious doesn't begin to describe it.

So I wrote a shell script that used Unix commands to create an archive of the directory structure and files, extract it in the new location, make all the directories automatically. Big time savings for me and the entire engineering team. Everyone used it.

I've built a lot of things over the years, but honestly? That stupid little script probably gave me peak satisfaction. That feeling of solving a real problem that annoyed everyone? That's what I'm chasing.

What This Moment Means

And that's what today was about. With these AI tools, you can solve so many problems that used to be impossible or require weeks of work. I have meetings with lots of smart people who don't have time to follow this space breathlessly. To them, I'm bringing fire down from the heavens. Things that were "impossible" months ago are now weekend projects.

It blows people's minds. It changes their workflows. And I love being the person who connects those dots.

"I'm excited, man. You've just changed my life in the last hour. So thank you. This is nuts. Yeah. No. I had no idea this technology existed. So yeah. Appreciate you, man."
-- Non-profit Executive Director

Hours before this GitHub discovery, I didn't know it was possible. Now my newsletter digest runs automatically. Next week, it'll run again without me touching anything. The week after that, same thing. That script I spent months occasionally running manually? Automated forever in an afternoon.

Having Real Fun Again

During a call with grad school friends last week, someone asked what I'm doing now. I told them about this progression: how I started building and playing with AI tools during a job hunt, just to see what I could do. How it slowly transformed into what I actually do now, which is AI strategy and execution for clients who need someone to navigate this chaos with them.

I'm having fun. Real, deep, satisfying fun. The kind I haven't felt since those early startup days when everything seemed possible. My childhood tinkering instinct, my automation obsession, my inability to do boring work twice... it all suddenly makes sense in this moment where AI lets me solve problems at the speed of thought.

I hope I get to help you find your version of this feeling. Because in this moment, being someone who can't leave well enough alone and needs to fix everything? It's actually a superpower.

Next Week's Rabbit Hole: Content Machine

Will the GitHub Actions automation actually keep working, or will I spend another couple hours debugging it? Either way, it's an investment in my "AI Transformation Consultant" practice. 😉

But the real challenge is streamlining my content game. As an independent consultant, I always have to be selling. That's what everyone tells me anyway. So many half thoughts in my notes that I haven't developed and gotten out there. I'm thinking some Claude Code agents to help me stay on track stylistically and workshop how I share content to different platforms? I have lots of thoughts. If I'm doing it right, it will help my personal operations and be a fun story to tell.