Two Days, One Inn, and a Dashboard of My Own
On the night of 19 October 2026 I made a small request to Claude. I wanted a dashboard connected to my Gmail. A to-do list, a calendar, the weekly reports from my websites, and errors that climb higher on their own if they repeat or if I ignore them. It should also tell me which emails are useless and which ones I should unsubscribe from. Oh, and an Android app later. And WhatsApp too, if possible.
A small request. 😁
The first thing Claude did was not write code. It read my inbox. About two hundred emails a week. One of my websites had a build fail twice in one week, and both emails were still sitting there unread. So the exact problem I wanted the dashboard to solve was already in my inbox, laughing at me.
Then came the questions. Where to keep the data, which AI to use, how to connect WhatsApp. Every question came with a recommendation, and every decision was mine. The work ran the way I have been working lately, one ustad and many shagirds. The ustad plans and checks, the shagirds write the code.
That same night ATBHub was live. 316 of my emails were summarised, the error ladder was working, and the unsubscribe list had companies whose 19 emails I had never opened. Not one.
Now WhatsApp. I thought there was some agent option inside WhatsApp that would do the job. The research said there is no official way at all to read your own personal WhatsApp. In the end we picked an open source tool and put it on my old MacBook, the one that just sits in the corner now. And something interesting came up. That tool had auto reply switched on by default. If we had just run it as it was, my number would have started replying to people on its own. We turned that off, built the tool ourselves from its source code, and gave it read-only access.
I gave a lot of trouble over the design. The first one was plain, so I said make it futuristic. Three options came. I said show me fantasy ones. Three more came. I said zoom in, I can’t see anything. 😂 Then I gave the names of my favourite books, The Wandering Inn, Stormlight and the Dresden Files. The Wandering Inn won. A wooden notice board, old parchment notes, and my tasks are now called “Quests”. I added one more request, that the colours change with the weather in Jhol. Now it turns blue at night, green when it rains, and deep red when the heat goes above 38 degrees.
How safe is my data?
Then I asked the question I should have asked on day one. How safe is my data?
The answer was honest. The biggest risk was not some hacker. It was a decision I had made myself. To save money I had picked Gemini’s free tier, and on the free tier Google can use your data to improve its products. That means my emails, and other people’s WhatsApp messages too. Saving a few cents was an expensive deal. We moved to the paid tier, put a firewall on the old Mac, turned off password logins, gave every job its own separate key, and WhatsApp messages now delete themselves after 30 days.
After that, the Android app. I said clearly that I did not want an app that runs inside Chrome. Supabase and other options were researched, and a real Android app was built. Fingerprint lock, works offline, push notifications, and a WhatsApp backup on the phone so messages keep coming even when the Mac is off. It was installed on my phone over Wi-Fi. The first pairing failed four times and worked on the fifth.
Then the last part, and for me the most important one. My work groups, where people ask me to do things and the asks get buried in the chat. Now whenever someone asks me to do something, the AI recognises it and puts it in my list on its own. It stays there until I mark it done myself. Every day it sits there, it climbs one level. On the fourth day it reaches level four and my phone gets an alert. If a task needs more time I can bring it down one level, but it starts climbing again. No excuses.
There were mistakes too, and those should be told. The WhatsApp summaries used to say “Me told the group”. Once I asked my team to do something and the AI put that same task in my own list. And one app update failed because three versions went out in one day and the app was checking against an older one. Every mistake was caught, fixed, and given a test. By the end there were 181 tests on the server and 67 in the app.
Two days. A web app, an Android app, a bridge to WhatsApp, a daily and a weekly email, and an inn that changes colour with my weather. And I did not write a single line of code myself. My job was to make the decisions, and to ask the right questions.
AI can build almost anything for you, but you have to ask yourself where your data is going.
If you want to build a system like this for yourself, let me know and I will share the details. And if I got anything wrong, corrections are always welcome.