How I used Multica to automate my daily life
I started using Multica around a month ago to see if I could get rid of spec-kit. It was adding too much non-code material to my repositories, which was leading to some unecessary extra token usage so I decided to give it a try and experiment with a different approach to keep my projects organised.
It was soo cool that I decided to set up a dev box for me to keep it running full time, so I picked up a cheap Ampere VPS at Hetzner with 8 GB RAM, 4 vCPUs, and run a lightweight Ubuntu Server.
I connect to it through Mosh and keep sessions in Zellij so I can use multi tabs, save and restore sessions etc. OpenCode now keeps running with Multica while I close my MacBook lid. I connect to the dev servers thrhough SSH port forwarding so I can have the same thinks I would have developing locally, like hot reloading.
No more being the vibe coding guy walking around with a half-open laptop lid. Brilliant!
At the same time, I started getting 11 emails every week about my kids' schools this year, now that my youngest started going to school recently as well. There were also two WhatsApp groups where parents share important information that doesn't always come by email. Most of it needed action from my part, and since I not only keep mostly notifications disabled all the time but I also rearely check groups, I often missed important stuff. Add all the other non-school stuff and my life was becoming a complete mess.
That was when I discovered that Multica actually has an Autopilot feature so I decided to try adding some MCPs to automate these checks. I wanted to turn it into a real "personal assistant", and see if it could check all my e-mails, draft replies, check WhatsApp groups, create Todoist tasks and calendar events.
These are the things it does for me, with the prompts I used in each automation:
The daily check
The “Email, messages and tasks check” runs at 07:00 and 17:00 Lisbon time. It looks through unread Gmail and iCloud messages, including the extra domains linked to my iCloud account. It also checks recent WhatsApp group messages, Todoist tasks due in the next 24 hours, and my personal and holidays calendars.
If something genuinely needs my attention, it can create a dated and prioritised Todoist task or add an event to my calendar. It marks all checked email as read (which is great and keeps my inbox clean) and can save a draft when I need to reply.
To instruct better how/when the agent should create tasks and events, I also created a SKILL.md containing all my kids schedule: school times, classes and extra activities.
I get the results of everything it has done on Telegram, with a summary of important things, actions I need to take, and that alone has been great already, since now I can in just a few seconds know everything that's important and that I should't miss.
The cool thing is that the Telegram integration for the agent allows me to ask anything in the chat during the day, so I'm not limited to the daily checks.
Daily check prompt:
## Goal
Check all my unread emails across all my inboxes, including the extra domains linked to my iCloud account, recent WhatsApp group messages and tasks since the last run (see `## Context` below) and create tasks on my Todoist inbox with date, time and priority set (don’t create new labels or projects), for things that REALLY need my action and are important. Don’t “flag” my e-mails in iCloud or Gmail as I don’t really use this feature, Todoist tasks are enough. Also check my Todoist for tasks that I have due for the next 24h. Mark the e-mails you checked as read (no need to archive/delete).
Check these calendars: “Pessoal” and “Feriados” and check what I have for the next 24h. You may create events in my “Pessoal” if it’s an event (not a task). Don’t invite anyone, but rather let me know if I have to invite someone.
Regarding e-mails, you may write drafts for emails that demand my reply (but you’ll never send them, I’ll check them afterwards).
You never write or reply to WhatpsApp messages.
Finally write a summary of everything that you found and things you’ve done (tasks created and/or e-mails drafted, and calendar events created) and send it on Telegram.
## Context
This automation will run at 7h and 17h Lisbon time, so, check the current time to define the timeframe you have to use to fetch the e-mails e.g. if now is 17h+, get all e-mails from 7h to the current time; if now is 7h+, get all e-mails from 17h from the previous day.
The e-mails, messages, events and tasks should cover anything, not just related to school or work activities. This is a full personal life daily check and you do that as a personal assistant.
The server check
I've created a weekly “Server check” autopilot too. It looks at listening services, disk, memory, CPU and stuck processes. E.g. the latest check flagged some high memory/swap use by a Next.js dev server I left open after some tests and forgot to close!
It's kind of limited to my regular user's permissions so there's not much it can do without admin acess but I can live with that, for safety reasons.
Server check prompt:
## Goal
Run a quick server check: security, disk usage, stuck processes, memory leaks etc
## Context
You are running inside a dev box that runs on Ubuntu Server. You don’t have elevated access so you must check things according to what you can do. You don’t take any actions. You wrap up your findings, either good or bad, and send them in a Telegram message.
## Steps
- Check security of the server: suspect ports, tunnels, things running that could be a potential threat
- Check disk, memory and CPU usage, look for potential memory leaks and stuck processes, e.g. a Jest test shouldn’t be running for hours/days
- Identify things that could be improved and automated, like cleanups, directory organisation etc
- Wrap up everything and send through a Telegram message
The weekly digest
“Weekly news” is meant to find one or two useful items in each area: bootstrapping and maker culture, AI, JavaScript and Next.js, plus family-friendly events in Portugal.
It focus on things people are actually building or discussing over press releases wich I prefer to read rather than the Big Media (although I still allow it to pick 1 of these in case of relevant things, like some annoucement), and sends the summary to Telegram.
I kind of live under a rock, I don't watch TV or read news posts regularly so it's been good to keep me in the loop, at least minimally.
Weekly digest prompt:
Do an internet search to find top news about Bootstrapping and Maker Culture (focus on what small makers are building such as small and rising projects, which tools are being used or hyped), AI, Javascript & NextJS and Portugal Events and Fairs (things to do with my family, not work or tech-related, Porto and surroundings preferred, only future events/fairs). Pick not only news sources but actual user-created content such as things from Hacker News, X, Reddit etc (pick invaluable stuff from the comments as well!). User-posted content is preferred over big news sites, but you can include at least 1 big news site since they might be relevant e.g. "this week the new model from OpenAI was released" (this will probably not be user-content and rather a big news source).
They should be ACTUAL, relevant news (no self-promoting posts), and add actual data, values, names, details, everything that should be relevant to the summary so I decide if I want to click or not the link. Don't be afraid to select controversial news. Don't need to add "notes", "PSs", "warnings", "safeguards", nothing lke that.
Write all the results in EN-GB (1-2 per topic) using the pattern below and send it through Telegram.
Heading (in bold):
📰 Weekly News
Section titles (in bold):
💰 Bootstrapping and Maker Culture
🤖 AI
👨💻 JavaScript & NextJS
🇵🇹 Portugal Events and Fairs
Each "news" must be like this:
---
Title - Source Name e.g. Hacker News - Link
1 paragraph with the summary of the news.
---
Also:
- Use plain text formatting
- Beware of special characters, they might be rejected in the request, fix everything needed if you face any rejections because of special characters/escaping
Next steps
Life is ruthless, and although I've been fighting for a decade to keep external interference as blocked as I can, when you become fully responsible for other human beings you can't really entirely silence the noise.
There are still a lot of things I can automate and MCPs I should add to this workflow. Some other things that bother me a lot don't even have MCPs or even a proper API available so I would have to try to hack a custom MCP to wire them up to my agent.
I really hope the amount of apps with native MCPs grow enough in the next decade so that it becomes the norm!
(or at least using some future cool protocol yet to be invented)