Day with AI: One Dashboard for the Entire Business. 8 Crons, Real-Time Overview, Zero Manual Work.

What I worked on today

Monday morning, and instead of coffee I rebuilt the entire automation system.

The Problem

I had 7 Vercel crons + 4 macOS LaunchAgents, but outputs were getting lost. Notifications flew into ntfy without context. I wanted one place to see everything — morning briefing, content ideas, pipeline, AI news.

What I did

Work-OS Hub dashboard — extended existing AI news dashboard into a universal operations center:

• 5 sections: Dashboard, AI News, Content, Pipeline, Archive
• Generalized feed API (`/api/feed`) — POST to write, GET to read, DELETE to clean up
• 7 components — Sidebar with Lucide icons, BriefingCard, ContentIdeas, IGContentPlan, PipelineView, WeeklyReview, FeedCard
• Markdown rendering via react-markdown
• Dark theme, glassmorphism, responsive

3 new crons:

• `previous-day` (08:00) — reads yesterday's log, AI generates LinkedIn + community draft
• `ig-content` (Monday 06:00) — proposes 2 reels + 1 carousel from weekly logs
• `cold-email-pipeline` (11:00) — pulls pipeline metrics from Notion CRM

Reorganization:

• Weekly review moved from Friday to Monday 08:30 (weekend = off)
• Checklist moved to 10:00
• Deleted unnecessary finance-report
• All crons now push data to dashboard, ntfy just sends "check it" with a link

Issues along the way

1. Vercel Hobby limit — max 12 serverless functions, I had 15. Had to delete 4 deprecated endpoints.

2. Notion filter bug — Status property is type `status`, not `select`. Different query syntax.

3. CRON_SECRET — Vercel auto-injects it for cron calls, but for manual testing you need to set it in env vars.

4. Data contract mismatch — crons sent different field names than frontend expected. Typecheck didn't catch it (generic `Record`). Runtime crash.

Lessons learned

Typecheck isn't enough. After every API + FE integration you must test the full flow end-to-end: send data, load it, click every section. Also: no emoji in UI — Lucide SVG icons, always.

Time: AI vs without AI

Task	Without AI	With AI

Dashboard (API + FE + 7 components)	2-3 days	~2h
3 new cron endpoints	1 day	~30min
Reorganization + debugging	4h	~1.5h
Total	3-4 days	~4h

What I learned

• Vercel Hobby plan has a hard limit of 12 functions — count ahead
• Notion API distinguishes `select` vs `status` property types — always verify schema
• Data contracts between API and FE must be tested at runtime, not just typechecked
• Emoji in UI = unprofessional, SVG icons always