I keep a running list of agents I wish existed. Not the kind that writes my emails or generates a marketing plan from a bullet list — the kind that watches for things I care about and tells me when something moves. This is that list.
Each entry is specific and technically possible with today's APIs and models. And each one, as it turns out, needs the same three pieces of infrastructure.
Five domains, one pattern.
Media and entertainment
Music discovery. I want an agent that watches my Spotify listening history, cross-references it with artists I've saved, and sends a Friday digest of new releases from artists I actually listen to. Not Discover Weekly — which is good but generic — something that knows I played the same album eight times this month and checks if that artist dropped anything new.
Books. An agent that monitors Goodreads for new releases from authors in my "read" shelf. Not a newsletter signup. An actual listener on the catalog that notices a publication date and tells me about it.
Podcasts. An agent that monitors three or four feeds I follow and tells me when an episode features a guest from a list I maintain. I don't need to know about every episode — just the ones where someone I track shows up.
Information and discovery
Hacker News. An agent that watches the front page for posts matching keywords I care about — "proactive agents," "webhook infrastructure," "AI reliability" — and sends a batch at end of day. Not real-time. Real-time would be noisy and distracting. A daily digest with the top three or four threads and a one-line summary of each.
Reddit. Same pattern, different source. Watch two or three subreddits for discussion threads above a certain engagement threshold and surface the good ones.
Twitter/X. An agent that watches a curated list of people I follow for threads over a certain reply count on topics I've flagged. Useful for catching discussions I'd otherwise miss because I wasn't scrolling at the right hour.
GitHub repos. Suggest repositories I should know about — competitive, helpful, or just interesting. Watch trending repos filtered by language and topic, cross-referenced against my starred repos. Weekly digest.
Every item converges on the same triple.
Financial and logistics
Bank alerts. An agent that watches transaction categories and flags anomalies — not "you spent $4.50 at Starbucks" but "your utility bill was 40% higher than last month" or "there's a subscription charge from a service you cancelled." Pattern detection, not line-item reporting.
Flight prices. A listener on specific routes I'm planning trips for, alerting me when the price drops below a threshold I set. The airline apps do a version of this, but they only watch their own inventory. I want a listener that spans carriers.
Package tracking. An agent that consolidates all active shipments — Amazon, UPS, FedEx, whatever — into a single daily "here's where everything is" summary instead of five separate carrier emails. Better yet, one that knows I have a flight Thursday and flags a delivery that'll arrive while I'm away. Some of these exist as standalone apps, but the point is having agents that share context — my package tracker knows about my calendar.
Professional
Competitor intelligence. An agent that watches what my competitors are doing — new product launches, changelog updates, documentation changes, pricing shifts. Not a quarterly report someone assembles manually, but a listener on their public footprint that notices when something moved and tells me what changed. A weekly digest of "here's what shipped in your space" would save hours of manual scanning.
Vendor monitoring. A listener on the APIs and services I depend on — Stripe, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Vercel. Alert me on breaking changes, deprecation timelines, new features I should know about. Most of these publish changelogs, but nobody reads changelogs proactively. An agent that diffs the docs and tells me "Stripe deprecated this endpoint you're using" or "OpenAI shipped a new model that's cheaper for your use case" would catch things I'd otherwise discover after they break.
Error monitoring. An agent that watches Sentry for new error classes (not individual errors) and files a ticket in Linear when a new one appears, with context about what changed in the most recent deploy.
Calendar blocking. An agent that reviews my calendar Sunday night, blocks focus time in open slots on Monday and Tuesday mornings, and removes the blocks if meetings fill in later. Defensive scheduling without me having to think about it.
The pattern
| Wish list item | Listener | Clock | Inbox |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify digest | New releases API | Weekly | Push notification |
| HN monitor | Front page scrape | Daily batch | Email digest |
| Bank anomalies | Transaction feed | Real-time | SMS alert |
| Competitor watch | Public changelogs, docs | Weekly | Digest |
| Vendor monitoring | API docs, changelogs | On change | Slack DM |
| Error monitoring | Sentry events | Real-time | Linear ticket |
| Calendar blocking | Calendar events | Sunday night | Calendar itself |
Every single entry requires a listener (something observing changes in an external system), a clock (when to batch, summarize, or digest), and an inbox (where to deliver the result). The mix differs — Spotify leans clock-heavy with its weekly digest, error monitoring leans listener-heavy with real-time alerts — but all three primitives are present in every case.
Two of these already exist
The HN and Reddit items from this list already have a working implementation. The weekly-digest agent scans three subreddits and Brave Search, clusters the results by topic, and files a GitHub issue. Total cost per run: under a dollar. It took a weekend to build.
That's worth noting because this list can read as aspirational hand-waving. Some of it is. But the items closest to our own domain are already shipping, and the pattern that made them buildable (fan-out gather, dedup, cluster, deliver) would work for most of the other items too.
Pick one and build it
If any of these sparked something, here's a rough sense of complexity:
| Item | Complexity | Why |
|---|---|---|
| HN / Reddit monitor | Easy | Public APIs, no auth, low volume. We built it in a weekend. |
| GitHub repo suggestions | Easy | GitHub trending + starred repos API. Straightforward diff. |
| Error monitoring → Linear | Medium | Sentry webhooks exist but need signature verification and dedup. |
| Competitor changelog watch | Medium | RSS where available, scraping where not. Change detection is the hard part. |
| Spotify new releases | Medium | Spotify API requires OAuth, rate limits are tight, catalog is large. |
| Calendar blocking | Medium | Google Calendar API is well-documented but write access is sensitive. |
| Bank anomaly detection | Hard | Plaid or open banking APIs, PII handling, false positive cost is high. |
| Cross-carrier package tracking | Hard | No unified API. Each carrier is its own integration. |
The "easy" items share a pattern: public data, read-only access, low stakes if the agent misses something. Start there. The infrastructure you build for an easy agent (scheduling, dedup, delivery) transfers directly to the harder ones.
More wishes, same plumbing
This list honestly gets longer every month. New APIs ship, new use cases come up, new things annoy me enough that I think "an agent should handle this." But the infrastructure underneath is always the same: the three primitives, wired together with durable state. I keep waiting for one of these to need something different, and it hasn't happened yet.
Posted May 11, 2026· AgentWorkforce
Issues, PRs, and arguments welcome on GitHub. Or email [email protected].