Category Archives: bots

AI, bots, Business

Agentic AI for SMB Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is becoming impossible for small companies to manage manually.

At the same time, CMMC compliance is no longer optional for companies working with the Department of DefenseWar. Since late 2025, cybersecurity requirements are now embedded directly into DoW contracts, forcing suppliers and subcontractors to prove they can protect sensitive data. (Business Defense)

The problem?

Most SMBs don’t have a security operations center.
They barely have a security engineer.

Meanwhile attackers are moving faster every year.

The good news: AI agents are starting to change the equation.

We’re entering the era of agentic cybersecurity—where autonomous AI systems monitor infrastructure, collect compliance evidence, and respond to threats continuously.

If implemented correctly, this can give small teams enterprise-level security operations with almost no additional headcount.

This post explains:

  1. What “agentic AI” actually means for cybersecurity (and why Claude won’t give it to you with some ‘vibe’)
  2. How it helps with CMMC compliance and real-time threat monitoring
  3. The risks you must design around
  4. A simple architecture you can build today
  5. How platforms like EspressoLabs (with the Barista AI) fit into this shift
Continue reading →
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bots, Business, JavaScript

Streamline Engineering Updates with Slack to Notion Bot

There’s been a lot of noise lately about productivity tools and the “perfect” engineering workflow.
Let’s slow down and separate what actually works from what just creates more overhead.

Here’s a boring truth: Slack is incredible for quick, ephemeral communication.
Here’s a less comfortable truth: It is an absolute nightmare as a system of record.

If you lead an engineering team or run a startup, you probably have a #daily-updates or #eod-reports channel.
The theory is sound.

Everyone drops a quick note at the end of the day: what they shipped, what blocked them, what’s next.

But here is what actually happens:

Those updates get posted.
Someone replies with an emoji.
A thread erupts about a weird bug in production.
Someone posts a picture of their dog.

By Friday, when you’re trying to answer a simple question—“What did we actually accomplish this week?”—those reports are buried under a mountain of noise.

You find yourself scrolling endlessly.
It’s exhausting.
And it doesn’t scale. Not to mention that if you will need SOC-2 (and you will 🙂 ) –> you can’t say “we have everything in Slack”

Why not just force everyone into Jira or Linear?

You could.
But engineers hate context-switching just to write a status update.
Slack is where the conversation is happening.
The friction to post there is zero.

The problem isn’t the input. The problem is the storage.

So I (=Gemini+Claude) built a bridge.

Meet the Slack → Notion EOD Sync Bot

I got tired of losing track of momentum, so I wrote a bot that does the tracking for us.

It’s a lightweight NodeJS service that automatically extracts End-of-Day reports from Slack and structures them beautifully in a Notion database.

Continue reading →
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bots

Don’t Write Release Notes – Use Release-Relay

You know that feeling.
It’s Friday afternoon.
The sun is shining (or the rain is pouring, depending on where you live), and your team has just wrapped up a sprint.
You’ve deployed code, fixed bugs, and maybe even sneaked in a feature or two.
You’re ready to close your laptop and grab a cold beverage.

But wait.
A Slack notification pops up.

“Hey, can you send out the release notes?”

The dread sets in.
You open GitHub.
You scroll through the closed Pull Requests. “Fix typo,” “Update dependency,” “WIP,” “Revert ‘WIP’,” “Actually fix the thing,” “Merge branch ‘main’ into ‘feature/fix-typo’.” It’s a mess. Organizing this into something your manager (or your users) can actually read is a task that sucks the soul right out of your weekend.

Meet the “Release Notes Generator”

I built a tool—let’s call it Release-Relay.
It’s a CLI tool that does the heavy lifting for you.
It connects to your GitHub repository, grabs all the merged PRs between two dates, and turns them into a beautiful, structured Markdown report.

But it’s not just a git log dump.
Oh no, we have standards here.

Continue reading →
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AI, bots

Leveraging OpenClaw as a Web Developer

This post is a sort of TL;DR about OpenClaw –> What it is, why it matters, and how to integrate it into real workflows

OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework that enables you to build conversational and automated systems running on your own infrastructure. Unlike typical “chatbot SDKs,” OpenClaw turns large language models into agents that do real work — handling messages, executing workflows, and integrating with tools and APIs.

For web developers, this opens up a new category of integrations: intelligent assistants embedded into your app, autonomous workflows triggered via REST or webhooks, and programmable bots that connect multiple systems.

“with great power comes great responsibility”

What OpenClaw Actually Is

At its core, OpenClaw consists of these components:

  • Agent Core – orchestrates conversation state and skill invocation.
  • Channels – adapters that connect your agent to messaging platforms (Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, browser UIs, REST endpoints).
  • Skill Engine – modular plugins that define actionable logic (e.g. work in your browser with your permissions, read email, fetch data, run a workflow).
  • Sandbox – a safe execution environment for custom code. Start with it and move slowly to allow it more permissions (OpenClaw)

Importantly for developers: OpenClaw is model-agnostic — you choose the LLM provider (OpenAI, Claude, or self-hosted models). It’s also fully open source (MIT), so you can extend and embed it in your deployments without vendor lock-in.

Continue reading →
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bots, Business, life

ChatGPT/Bard And The Future Of Your Job

AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard are designed to automate specific tasks and make them more efficient.
Some jobs will be eliminated (e.g., customer service, lawyers, software developers, designers), but in other cases, these tools will likely change the nature of the particular role that a person is doing and require workers to adapt to new technologies.

In other words, “if you can’t beat it – join it.”

Continue reading →
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bots

Hey Google, Talk To Highway 80 Conditions

[Updated 8/2025: Try this web app]

Next time you are driving to Tahoe you don’t need to open the phone, navigate to the browser and check if the road is closed (or not).

You can just ask the Google Assistant: “Hey Google, Talk To Highway 80 Conditions”.

You will get the most updated data about the road like in the example below:

Screenshot 2018-03-22 11.38.28

Please ignore the text formatting (which I’ll improve in the near future) as it should be use as voice only while you are driving.

Check it on the Google Assistant or on the web here.

If you are using Telegram check this.

Be safe!

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OK Google, Talk To Northstar Pow Day!

Northstar pow day action on google

Northstar Pow Day – Action on Google

Last week, we had a big storm at Tahoe.

I thought it might be great if with one quick question (while you washing our face in the morning) you can learn if it’s a powder day.
After all, when there is a pow day, you should close the shop and run for the slopes, no?

The result is here: pow-day-northstar.glitch.me and you can find the code at GitHub.

If you are on a mobile device, click here to check it on the assistant, or just say “Hey Google, talk to Northstar pow day”.

Have fun!

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An Amazing Apps For The Google Assistant – Chatbot Summit 2018

chat Bot Summit

Here are the slides from my talk today at the Chat Bot Summit.

It was a great experience to talk about the Google Assistant platform and to run two workshops with live coding.

If you could not make it and you wish to test this platform, you can go over the slides (and other tutorials or videos) and check on of the code labs that we have for the Assistant on your own.

There are many good apps that you can check in order to get ideas and inspiration. Here are some apps for the Assistant that I’ve created for the code labs and demos.

Good luck!

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Generate TTS Using Your Terminal

It’s not a new hack but it will work well if you have short texts (1-3 sentences) that you wish to convert to speech.

After all, when returning a response to the Google Assistant, you can use a subset of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

Why?

Because you can make your agent’s responses seem more life-like experience.

How?

Open your terminal and try something like this:

curl "http://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/synthesize?lang=en-us&text=actions+on+google+rock" -o aog-rock-hack.mp3

That’s it.

If you want to use SSML and get fancy, it’s also support it in the request: Continue reading →

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bots

Hey Google, Talk to Coffee Trivia Game

During the holidays, I had a bit of time to do some fun stuff with Actions on Google.

It started with an idea that a runner friend brought up during a long run and the results is “OK Google, Talk to Western State Race“. If you are an ultra trail runner, you are smiling now, right?

Later, it was around another passion – good coffee. I used the templates for Google Assistant to create a fun trivia game. It’s super easy, as you only need to copy a google sheet and update it with your questions and answers.

You can check the result by clicking here (on mobile) or just say something like “OK Google, Talk to Coffee Trivia Game”. Continue reading →

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