I let the system audit me this week, and it kept finding things I would have sworn were fine...

Quick catch up, because I have been heads down...

Here is what got built, cleaned, or caught in the last few days.

I am writing it out because the pattern underneath it is more interesting than the list.

(When it comes to process and automating your organization, the power is in the pattern.)

The store got smaller on purpose. Six products down to three. Two of them I had already decided to retire months ago... and both were still quietly on sale, able to take money, with a page still saying "pre-sale." 

(I did not know my own stores inventory. The fact that my Nitwyt OS caught and corrected it is the point.)

The newsletter has a real front door now. One page, one form, and a promise I can actually keep (so it's something that actually gets delivered!). You can see it at automatedwith.tech/newsletter — read the section called "What we do with your email" and see whether you believe it.

(That section is the part I am proudest of... As a business we want as little of your data as possible... ALWAYS. Hopefully our own example of a "PII minimal" approach inspires you as well.)

The legal page got honest. It said we might upload your email to Facebook and Google to build advertising audiences. I decided against that. Since the beginning of AutomatedWith.tech we have never run an ad and we aren't ever planning to. Products and services produced are either too good not to share with others or not good enough to share yet.

It also helped me see where the system was collecting IP addresses in the forms and where to disconnect all that so we remain PII minimal (as always if you notice anything that isn't please let me know so we can address it).

Nitwyt (the thing I built from my own NDK) Two of my own pages (ones I created months ago before Nitwyt OS was automating our organization) were arguing with each other and neither of them knew they weren't needed...

A podcast that never existed is gone. A plugin, a feed, an archive page that returned a real page titled "Episode List" with zero episodes in it. Live on the internet. For months.

(This is making it's debut on the @ThisIsYourMindOnAI YouTube channel shortly.)

Ten of my forms became two. The other eight were practice attempts from a year ago, all still active, all still collecting nothing, and all getting in my way because I couldn't really see what was going on.

And the one that actually rattled me.

Every person who bought the kit had write access to the source repository.

Not read. Write.

I had said out loud, on the record, that those invitations were read-only.

I believed it.

The reason I believed it is that GitHub's own screen never asked me, it just handed out write and moved on.

Nobody did anything wrong.

Nothing broke.

But for months, any one of them could have. 😅

I only found it because I finally built the thing (Nitwyt OS!) that checks. 

Here is why I am telling you all of this instead of just fixing it quietly...

Every item above is the same story.

Not "I was careless."

I was busy, and the world moved, and the documents/pages/forms/products stayed where I left them.

That gap is normal.

It is where most of the mess in a small business actually lives.

(Maybe you've experience this yourself running your own business?)

The thing I am building is not a tool that does the work.

It is a system that keeps checking whether what I believe is still true, and tells me plainly when it is not.

This week it told me eight times.

Every one of those was a thing I would have confidently told you was fine.

(And yes, Nitwyt also went in and fixed everything it found after bringing me in the loop to let me know the current status of the mess I had built.) 😁

If you want to see the shape of how it thinks, the LEAP examples are here — open the examples folder, start with chaos_sorter_intake, and use the Raw button so you see the whole file.

If you want to see behind the scenes where others are sharing how they are using they own Nitwyt Developing Kit, you'll want to get access to the .leap Studio.

If you aren't quite ready for that, I'll be dropping more throughout the days and weeks ahead as I continue to explore how Nitwyt is automating AutomatedWith.tech...