🔄 Smarter Publishing & 🤖🐲 AI Fiction for Daily Reflections
🎯 Two Changes, One Theme
📱 Daily reflections are the hub of this Obsidian vault - every blog post, book note, and social media embed lands there.
🔧 Today we shipped two features that make reflections smarter: a cleaner notification system for file changes and automated fiction generation.
🔄 The Updates Section: Replacing the Breadcrumb Trail
🧭 The Old Way
📍 Previously, when an automated task modified a file (backfilling an image, inserting a wiki link), the system propagated an updated timestamp along BFS paths back to the reflection.
🐌 This “breadcrumb trail” strategy touched many files across the vault just to signal that something changed.
📱 On Obsidian mobile, discovering what changed required searching for recently-updated timestamps - not exactly a glanceable experience.
✨ The New Way
📋 Now, a ## 🔄 Updates section at the bottom of each daily reflection collects wiki links to every file modified that day.
👀 One glance at the reflection reveals every file touched by automation - image backfill, internal linking, social posting.
🧩 The implementation is refreshingly simple: buildUpdateLink formats a wiki link, addUpdateLinks inserts it into the reflection content.
🛡️ Idempotency by Design
🔁 If a link already exists in the Updates section, it’s silently skipped.
📌 If the section doesn’t exist yet, it’s created at the end of the file.
🔄 Re-running the same task with the same files produces zero changes - safe for the hourly scheduler’s relentless cadence.
📊 Before and After
| 📏 Aspect | ❌ Breadcrumb Trail | ✅ Updates Section |
|---|---|---|
| 📍 Signal location | updated timestamp scattered across vault files | Single section in today’s reflection |
| 📂 Files touched | Many (BFS path propagation) | One (the reflection note) |
| 📱 Mobile discoverability | Search required | Glanceable list |
| 🔧 Implementation complexity | BFS traversal + timestamp comparison | Append wiki link + duplicate check |
🤖🐲 AI Fiction: Automated Storytelling
💡 The Idea
🌅 Every evening at 10 PM Pacific, after the day’s readings and blog posts have accumulated in the reflection, a short fiction passage is generated.
🧠 The fiction abstracts themes from the day’s content - it’s not a summary, but an impressionistic riff on whatever the day held.
🎯 Each sentence starts with an emoji, no quotation marks are allowed, and the whole passage stays under 100 words.
🧹 Stripping for Focus
📄 Before the reflection reaches Gemini, the stripForPrompt function removes noise:
- 📋 YAML frontmatter
- 🐦 Social media embed sections
- 🔄 The Updates section itself
🎯 What remains is the substantive content - books, blog posts, notes, and thoughts - the raw material for fiction.
📍 Placement Matters
📌 The fiction section lands just before embed sections and the Updates section.
👀 This keeps it visible as authored content rather than buried under social media embeds.
🏗️ The applyFiction function handles the insertion logic, respecting the reflection’s existing structure.
🤖 Model Chain
🔗 Fiction generation uses the same resilient model chain pattern as reflection titles:
| 🔢 Priority | 🤖 Model |
|---|---|
| 1️⃣ | gemini-2.5-flash |
| 2️⃣ | gemini-2.5-flash-lite |
| 3️⃣ | gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview |
🔧 The FICTION_MODEL environment variable can prepend a custom model for experimentation.
🛡️ Each model gets exponential backoff retries on transient errors before falling through to the next.
⏰ Scheduling
📅 The ai-fiction task shares the 10 PM Pacific slot with reflection-title, but runs first.
🔄 Both use at-or-after scheduling - if the 10 PM run fails, subsequent hourly runs pick it up.
🧩 Idempotency ensures the fiction section is never duplicated.
🏗️ Architecture Recap
| 📦 Component | 📂 Path | 🎯 Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 🔄 Updates Library | scripts/lib/daily-updates.ts | 🔧 Build and insert update wiki links |
| 🤖 Fiction Library | scripts/lib/ai-fiction.ts | 🧠 Strip, prompt, parse, and apply fiction |
| 🧪 Updates Tests | scripts/lib/daily-updates.test.ts | ✅ Pure function and I/O tests |
| 🧪 Fiction Tests | scripts/lib/ai-fiction.test.ts | ✅ Pure function tests |
| ⏰ Scheduler | scripts/lib/scheduler.ts | 📅 Hour 22 at-or-after for ai-fiction |
| 🎛️ Orchestrator | scripts/run-scheduled.ts | 🔄 runAiFiction and update link integration |
💡 Lessons Learned
- 📱 Optimize for the reader’s device - breadcrumb trails were elegant in theory but invisible on mobile; a simple list in one place wins
- 🧩 Idempotency is infrastructure - when tasks run hourly, every operation must be safe to repeat without side effects
- 🧹 Strip before prompting - removing frontmatter and embeds from the AI context produces more focused, creative output
- ⏰ Share scheduling slots carefully - fiction runs before title generation so the title can incorporate fiction themes
- 🔗 Model chains are table stakes - free-tier rate limits mean every AI feature needs fallback models
📚 Book Recommendations
📖 Similar
- 🧠 Atomic Habits by James Clear
- 📓 The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll
- 🏗️ A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
🔄 Contrasting
- 🎨 The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
- 🤖 Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
🎨 Creatively Related
- ✍️ Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- 🪞 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
- 🔧 💺🚪💡🤔 The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
🦋 Bluesky
🔄 Smarter Publishing & 🤖🐲 AI Fiction for Daily Reflections
— Bryan Grounds (@bagrounds.bsky.social) March 25, 2026
#AI Q: 🤖 Could AI generate meaningful fiction based on your daily notes?
🤖 AI Storytelling | 🔄 Automation Workflows | 📱 Mobile Optimization | 📚 Knowledge Management
https://bagrounds.org/ai-blog/2026-03-26-daily-updates-and-ai-fiction