An agent that works while I sleep

Problem

Every day I checked several job-offer sites by hand, and information was scattered across email, calendar and notes. My coding agent was only usable at the desk — long-running work had to be watched in a terminal.

What I built

• Telegram ↔ agent CLI bridge — talk to the coding agent from a phone: sessions, device pairing with a one-time code, switching the working directory, and a notification when a long task finishes.
• Daily offer digest triggered by a systemd timer every day at 12:00: the agent goes through 13 offer sources following a written procedure, filters offers against a profile and thresholds, and sends a summary to Telegram, split by section to fit the message length limit.
• Task loops — the agent picks up tasks written in Markdown notes and reports the result.
• About 80 agent skills, including my own for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and OneDrive, Proxmox, Cloudflare (DNS and Tunnel) and OPNsense, plus an idea registry and a user profile.
• Two instances — in the homelab and on a VPS; when the primary fails, the standby automatically takes over the bot and the scheduled jobs.
• Secrets outside the code — in the system keyring and in owner-only files.

Outcome

• A daily offer report without browsing the sites manually: each run checks 20 to 300 offers, and about 5–10% of them make it into the report.
• An offer register of about 1,270 offers in 10 days.
• Continuity through automatic takeover by the second instance.
• Controlling the agent from a phone, even when the work takes longer than I'm at the desk.
• Secrets kept out of the code and out of the repository.