The other day I built a thing that watches a subreddit where people post when they’re about to lose their housing. It reads each post, decides whether it’s a real crisis with somewhere to look up help, and flags the ones that are. That half worked. The problem was everything after the flag was me, by hand, at whatever hour: pull the post, go dig through 211 pages and county shelter lists and half-dead nonprofit websites, figure out which doors are actually open, write something human back. Good work, but slow, and only as reliable as how tired I was.
Today I finished writing the worm/ spider to do most of the grunt work for me.
It runs across two little always-on raspberry pi computers now. When I claim a post, one of them wakes up on its own, goes and does the research — soup kitchens, food banks, coordinated-entry intake lines, whatever the situation needs — checks that the places it found are actually real and current, files a sourced worksheet, and pings my phone that it’s ready. Then a second skill takes that worksheet and drafts a reply: breathe first, here are the closest doors in the order I’d call them, a few honest words, and everything else it turned up. I rewrite the draft in my own voice and post it myself, from my own account. The machine never talks to anyone. It just does the legwork I used to do and hands it to me.
Almost none of that went smoothly so I’m making a post.
The research agent kept stopping to ask permission before it could look anything up — fine when I’m sitting there, useless if it’s supposed to run while I sleep. So it got locked down instead: it can read the open web all it wants, and it can do exactly one thing beyond that, which is file its worksheet back home. No shell, no ability to run code, no way to reach anything but its own inbox. A read-only research crawler with its hands tied. Then I put a hard cap on how many pages it can pull in one go, so a bad website can’t send it into a loop — and the first time it ran live it hit that cap, wrote up what it had verified so far, and flagged the rest as unconfirmed, exactly like it was supposed to. Cost about a dollar-fifty for the run.
The last snag was the notification. It tried to text my phone through a public service my network can’t reach, and quietly failed every time — but failed the right way, so the actual worksheet still got saved. Turned out I’d already stood up my own notification server weeks ago and forgotten, except it was bolted shut so tightly that nothing but the machine it lived on could talk to it. Opened it up just enough, pointed the phone at it over the private network I run between my devices, and three test messages that had been piling up all landed at once.
Here’s the part that made the whole day worth it. While I was still wiring the plumbing, the thing found a man in Georgia — lost both parents years ago, no family within reach, got displaced when the place he was renting sold out from under him, sent his seven-year-old to stay with relatives because there was no room for the boy where he was headed. No car, no food, running out of time, and he ended his post apologizing for whining. I answered. He wrote back with his city. I narrowed it to the exact county line he was straddling and gave him the specific numbers that cover where he actually is. Later the same night the machine surfaced someone in Louisville just asking if there was any free way to eat — a post my own triage had written off as “not a housing crisis” and closed. It was wrong to close it. We can find a hungry person a hot meal same as we can find someone a shelter bed. Pulled it back open, ran the research, and sent a map of every free meal and food pantry in that city, including which ones will turn you away for living in the wrong zip code and which listings are dead ends that still show up online.
Two people, one ordinary Monday, both of them handed real doors instead of a shrug. That’s the whole reason the thing exists. The rest is just keeping it fed and pointed in the right direction — which, if you’ve read this far, you already know is most of the job with anything worth building.