Most recently, I've been building a small server for myself to track my day, todos, and just act as a frontend for some easy scripts (eg. just a direct line to running date to get timestamps). It's been a joy to use htmx and flask and just crank out features quickly.
I wrote about this a long time ago too: https://explog.in/notes/units.html. Units are critical, particularly when crossing language/engineer boundaries.
> you should always bias heavily for buy/download over build,
That's a good point; I haven't spent much time thinking through this based on the work I've done so far (heavily leaning towards build over buy, with an existing complex internal tool ecosystem).
I think I might still push for build (or maintain the ability to heavily customize) for things that are particularly important for areas the company aims to have a strong advantage in/are business critical.
That was a really fun post to read: I really like the approach you're taking with abbot -- making it easy to write new tools quickly by only adding the business logic while having fun. Not needing to worry about UIs is also excellent, and I suspect one of the biggest time sinks otherwise.