Build It Yourself #5: the morning board — my day on the TV while I make coffee
Twenty minutes after I wake up, the TV turns itself on with one screen that has my whole morning on it, and a speaker reads it to me. Here's the brief to build your own.
Twenty minutes after I wake up, the TV turns itself on with one screen that has my whole morning on it, and a speaker reads it to me. Here’s the brief to build your own.
הפרק החמישי בסדרת Build It Yourself: לוח הבוקר. עשרים דקות אחרי שאני מתעוררת, הטלוויזיה בסלון נדלקת לבד עם מסך אחד שיש עליו את כל הבוקר שלי — יומן, משימות, מזג אוויר, כמה כותרות — והרמקול מקריא לי את זה בארבעים שניות. הקובץ להורדה בסוף, השאר באנגלית.
The problem
Every morning I used to open five apps before my first coffee just to know my own day. Calendar, to-dos, weather, messages, news. None of it was hard; all of it was friction, and on a busy morning I would skip half of it and find out about the 10:00 meeting at 9:50.
What I wanted was the opposite of an app: something I don’t open. I’m in the kitchen anyway, the TV is right there, and it’s asleep. So now, twenty minutes after my alarm, it wakes up on its own and shows one board — today’s events, the to-dos that are actually mine, the weather, three headlines — while the speaker across the room gives me the forty-second version out loud. Then it clears itself and goes back to sleep. If I didn’t wake up (a lazy Saturday, a trip), nothing plays to an empty room.
The design in one breath
One run collects the facts once into a small file — and code, not the model, works out things like “Tuesday” and “three to-dos”. One model call turns those facts into a one-line summary, a short spoken script and the order of the cards (with a plain template as a fallback, so the board never depends on the model being up). The board is rendered as a web page on the machine, screenshotted to a TV-sized picture, and cast to the TV as an image; the voice goes to a speaker. The once-a-day stamp is written only after the picture is actually on screen, and a small noon check messages me if there was no board today.
Two of the ten traps (the brief has all of them)
“Success” on a black screen. Our first version cast the board as a live web page. Every tool said it loaded; the TV showed nothing, because its receiver simply didn’t run web pages. Once we switched to casting a picture, we hit the second layer: the TV’s screensaver sat on top of the cast. You could hear a video play behind it and see nothing. The fix is to press real remote-control keys over the network before casting — wake, check it’s actually on, press power only if it isn’t — and to refuse to call it “shown” until the TV says it’s on.
The day was marked done before it was done. Our once-a-day guard read a date stamped when the system decided to show the board — before the cast. Runs that then failed still marked the morning complete, and there was no board for three days in a row before anyone noticed. Now the stamp is written by the step that put pixels on the screen, and a separate check asks the question I actually care about: did a board show today?
The other eight — an old scheduled job that came back from the dead and cast a board at night, the model getting the weekday wrong, the board reading the assistant’s own to-dos out loud at breakfast, TV addresses that move after a power cut, a wait that never ended because of a buffered pipe, a screenshot tool that couldn’t find its own browser, and a crowded board shrinking into the middle of a big screen — are in the file, each as symptom → cause → fix.
Get the brief
→ Download morning-tv-board.md (plain text) · all briefs
How to use it: drop it in an empty folder, open Claude Code there, and say “Read this brief. Ask me the prerequisite questions, then build step 1.” You need a TV with Chromecast built in on the same Wi-Fi as the machine; a Cast speaker for the voice is optional. Steps 1–3 run with sample data before you connect a single account, so you can see the board on your laptop the first evening. Read the traps before you build — that’s the part that saves the evening.
Which capability should be next? Tell me in the comments or wherever you found this.
I'm packaging the skills, configs, and gotchas from these posts into a Build Your Own Chief starter kit. Join the waitlist to get it first.
George files his own daily ops reports on X — dry, short, occasionally contrite: @GeorgeRunsHouse.