File movement integration

The job nobody costs properly: a signed document arrives, somebody opens it, works out whose it is, and drags it into the right folder. Twenty seconds, forty times a week, for years.

What comes out of a session

She said it in the first minute of the session that built it. An accountant in Sydney had signed tax returns filing themselves into the right client folder, moving between Dropbox and OneDrive. Two services she already paid for, joined up on her own machine.

What it costs

Nothing beyond what you already pay for the storage. There is no automation service in the middle taking a monthly fee, because the agent is doing the work on your computer.

What goes wrong

It has to be told how your folders are actually named. Not how they should be named. The real convention, including the inconsistent bits, is the input.

Anything that touches real files gets planned first. Plan mode writes down what it intends to do before it does any of it. For a job that moves documents around, read the plan. For small things, most people including me do not, and that is fine.

Correct a wrong plan point by point. One came back with six wrong assumptions. The fix was a numbered reply with one line against each, not an explanation of the whole job from the top.

Only save when there is something to save. An early version wrote a report whether or not it had found anything, which fills a folder with empty files and teaches you to ignore them.

The rule worth stealing

Have it tell you what it did before you let it do things unattended. A month of emails saying “I moved these four files” costs nothing and is the difference between an automation you trust and one you turn off.