I Tried to Automate My Life with AI: False Hope, Letting Go, and a Little Bit of Magic

A morning in Can Tho, sitting in front of the screen, waiting for a bot to send me the weather. It was supposed to be one small test in the whole chain of automation I had sketched out for my own life. Instead it was the first time I understood that the dream of AI untangling everything can wobble more than you imagine, and that the one who needed an update might be me.

I am the type who has to try things. When people started talking about AI changing the world, about automation turning a working day into a series of light taps, I could not resist the urge to make it real. I used to run a business, and there was a stretch where I chased every checklist and kept a pile of habits from the kind of successful-person posts that show up each morning. But once I moved to working solo with AI and automation, all the promises of a weightless life started showing small cracks I had never prepared for.

I started with simple things: saving appointments, sending birthday reminders (which I never remember correctly, though I can recite the memes), letting n8n pull commodity prices every morning. A few of them ran beautifully. Watching the error lines on the screen thin out, I smiled and wondered whether I had just bought back a few hours of real life.

Then one evening I wired a few small tools together, hoping everything would still be running when I woke up. Instead, at three in the morning, my phone buzzed with n8n firing error after error: one extra character in a command, or an API that changed its shape without telling anyone. A strange sinking feeling arrived as I sat up, yawning, thinking, why exactly am I doing this to myself?

Something about chasing automation made me see that the human part of me had to adjust so it would not become the lab rat of the system I had built. Back when I led a team I believed everything could eventually be reduced to a formula: get the checklist template right and you are done. Later I saw that the habit of controlling everything was exactly what exhausted me most on the days the bot refused to behave.

Automation sounds like liberation. What it actually does, day by day, is map out the dependencies you could not see. Sometimes I ask myself: do I want the machine to take the worry, or have I just gathered all my worry onto a new object called a workflow? Some days I am delighted when everything runs smoothly. Other days one broken snippet is enough for every good feeling I have towards technology to vanish inside two lines of an error message.

The funny part is that once the machine settled down, I missed the falling-apart feeling of a stopped bot. It still has a strange pull. Maybe because I do not control all of it, so every repair feels like clearing a level, even when the prize is only a few dozen minutes of lost sleep.