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Automate a repetitive workflow

Always add a dry-run flag — automations silently corrupting data is the #1 failure mode.

by @whitney · recommended tool Claude Code · 0 unlocks

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You'll need

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Google Drive

EXAMPLES · WHAT THIS PROMPT PRODUCES

Sample output
**Automated: weekly competitor-pricing scrape → Google Sheet → Slack alert**

Replaced the manual Monday routine (open 8 competitor product pages, copy prices into a sheet, eyeball changes, message the team).

**How it works:**
- **Trigger:** runs every Monday 7:00am ET via a cron schedule (also runnable on-demand).
- **Inputs:** a `competitors.json` config listing 8 product URLs + CSS selectors for the price element.
- **Process:** fetches each page, extracts the price, compares against last week's stored snapshot.
- **Outputs:** appends a timestamped row to the Google Sheet (one column per competitor) and posts a Slack message — but only when a price actually changed, e.g. "⚠️ Acme dropped Pro from $49 → $39 (-20%)."

**Stack:** TypeScript (Node), `cheerio` for parsing, `googleapis` for Sheets, Slack webhook.

**Reliability features built in:**
- **`--dry-run` flag** — runs the full scrape and prints what it *would* write/post, touching nothing. Use this after any selector change.
- **Error handling** — per-URL try/catch; one dead page logs a warning and continues instead of killing the run.
- **Logging** — every run writes to `logs/scrape-YYYY-MM-DD.log` with rows fetched, changes detected, and any failures.

Included a README with the cron setup and where to drop the Google service-account key.
PRICE HISTORY0 cr · current

PROMPT TEMPLATE · v1.0.0

Automate this workflow: <DESCRIBE_CURRENT_MANUAL_STEPS>.
Trigger: <WHEN>. Inputs: <WHERE_FROM>. Outputs: <WHERE_TO>.
Stack: Python / TypeScript script, run on <SCHEDULE or EVENT>.
Include: error handling, logging, dry-run mode.

RESULTS · WHAT PEOPLE GOT

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