LinkedInfluencer 🤮 - My Public Meltdown 🤯 Will Continue, I Promise

I want to thank my friends Jake and Melinda for making it clear that my LinkedInfluencer series of posts is only fun to read while I’m publicly melting down, like I did in the first post. I promise to do my best to keep losing my 💩 and freaking out and questioning my worth, both as a computer programming drone ⚙️ and also just as a basic white man 👨. I’ll do it, I swear. But for now, on to the learning! (or skip directly to meltdown)

AI-enabled Todo List!

I know I just promised a public meltdown ☢️, but now that you’re here, let’s talk about AI! I’m excited to talk about my latest vibe coding adventure, creating an AI-friendly todo list.

Context Switching is the Devil

As you’re spinning up agents to handle all your work, it quickly becomes apparent that the main problem is no longer productivity, but context switching. Keeping track of all the things you’re doing, all the Slack threads you’re responding to, all the followups you’ve got, it’s impossible. A todolist is the way to handle this, but now that agents do everythihng, they should also be handling your todo list.

I wanted a list that could handle the following features:

1. Ability to quickly save Slack messages as todo items. The Slack “remind me later” feature just doesn’t do enough for me.
2. Can add todo items from my phone or computer.
3. Easily persisted across all platforms. True persistence, not some shitty markdown file in github or something. (see below)
4. Can add items directly from an AI session (Claude/Amp)
5. Can assign items to the AI, like “Hey, go work this for me”

Enter: Todoist + Skill + MCP

After a bit of back-and-forth with AI, we settled on Todoist. Why? Mainly because it has a first-class API, enabling me to generate an API key and give that to the AI to do its thing.

After signing up, I told Amp that I want to make a skill that can be auto-loaded. Amp immediately discovered that someone had already created an MCP server for Todoist. Pulling that in made skill creation trivial. So here’s the skill on github.

I told Amp to install the skill, restarted the session, and instantly was able to do things like “List my todos” or “What todos can you work on for me?” It’s not perfect, as the MCP server might be a little out of date, but it’s definitely workable.

Total Setup Time: About 15 minutes.

Persistence - The Archenemy of Vibe Coders

A big piece of this puzzle is persistence. Every vibe coded app I’ve seen so far completely punts 🏈 on persistence, usually faking it with a markdown file somewhere.

For this todo list setup, I don’t punt on persistence, but I also cheat by leaning on an existing todo list app. A true vibe coder would have built the entire thing from scratch and been quite pleased with himself for re-inventing the wheel.

I’ll tackle vibe coding with true hosting and persistence one of these days, as I’m curious to see how quickly things get un-fun once databases are involved. Can the AI agent provision me a DynamoDB instance in 30 seconds, or does it take 30 seconds only after 2 hours of futzing with AWS accounts?

But, until then, I’ll happily continue to parasite 🦠 off existing app infrastructures like Todoist, and I recommend the same to you, my adoring followers. Buy, don’t build. That’s still true.

Bonus: A Meltdown ☢️

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a treat, me melting down some more. 🤪 So here goes…

I’ve been spending the last month in emergency mode 🚨, freaking out after the layoffs where the 🐻 ate most of my colleagues and friends. In my mind, nothing was normal after that. Everything was a 💩-show, and it necessitated constant scream crying. 😭 I roamed the halls of the office screaming, “I’M THE ONLY ONE LEFT!” much to the surprise of everyone else also left. 😟

But here I am a month later, and I have to figure out a way to live in this new normal. I’m still angry that all my friends got eaten. And it feels like a betrayal to kneel at the 🕯️ altar 🕯️ of the 🐻 who ate them. But I need to eat and my morals are flexible, so kneel I shall. It helps that the 🐻 is so friendly and when I accuse it of eating my friends, it helpfully says, “You’re absolutely right! I ate your friends! 🥩”

P.S. The 🐻 is also not fully to blame here. Poor management 👨🏼‍🎨 at the top also led to a hiring binge. So the 🐻 made a good scapegoat when the opportunity came to flush the toilet. 🚽