Every morning I spend about 30 minutes scanning The Block, CoinDesk, Blockworks, Decrypt and Cointelegraph looking for anything that touches AI Agents, L2s, rollups or based sequencing. If a journalist published something relevant overnight I need to know about it before they’ve moved on to the next story, because by the time I find it reactively the window to pitch has already closed.
So I built an agent to do it for me. Meet Pitch Witch.
Meet the Intern
Right now Pitch Witch is functioning at about the level of a PR intern. She wakes up every weekday morning, scans RSS feeds from five publications, scores each article against a set of keywords I care about, cross-references matches against a journalist database I’ve built in Airtable (13 verified contacts with emails and growing) and delivers a prioritised briefing to my Slack. Ready-to-send pitch angles, source articles linked, urgency flagged.
About 200 lines of Python. I didn’t write it from scratch, I built it with Claude, piecing together scripts and API docs until it worked. And it did work. The first time.
The “It Works” Trap
Here’s what nobody warns you about when you build an agent: getting it to work once is the easy part. I had Pitch Witch scanning, scoring and delivering a Slack briefing within a day. I made a presentation about it.
Then I set her to run automatically and she sent one briefing and then went silent. No errors, no crash report, just nothing. I went back in, fixed the scheduling issue, got her running again and she pulled zero articles because an RSS feed had changed format overnight. Fixed that, then the Slack webhook expired. Fixed that, then Airtable rate-limited me because I hadn’t thought about throttling. Fixed that, then I noticed the keyword scoring was too aggressive and she’d been sending me empty briefings for three days before I even realised. At one point she just stopped messaging me entirely and I assumed she was broken again, but it turned out there were no relevant articles that day. She was working fine, I just didn’t trust her enough to believe it.
Every time I thought I’d fixed the last thing, something new broke. The pattern was always the same: Pitch Witch sends a briefing on the day I touch the code and then disappears the next morning.
What’s Actually Hard
Building the agent logic, the interesting part, took a day. Making it run reliably every morning without me babysitting it has taken weeks and it’s still not bulletproof. The recurring updates problem alone nearly made me scrap the whole thing because there’s something demoralising about an automation tool that only works when you’re sitting there watching it.
The culprits were never dramatic. A token expiring, an environment variable not persisting after a restart, a scheduling conflict. Trivial on their own, but stacked together they made me realise that reliability is the actual product, not the scanning or the scoring or the pitch matching. All of that is easy compared to “does this thing actually run when I’m not looking.”
I think this is the gap in the AI Agent conversation right now. Everyone talks about what agents can do but few people talk about what it takes to keep them doing it, day after day, without intervention. The demos always work. The second morning is where it gets real.
Where She’s Going
Pitch Witch works now. Most days. The roadmap is intern to junior to senior: right now she monitors and reports, next she’ll start drafting pitches and pattern-matching with Claude API integration, and eventually she’ll be autonomous enough to send pitches on my behalf. But none of that is happening until the daily briefing runs for two straight weeks. I’ve learned not to rush the promotion.
If you’re thinking about building an agent for your own workflow, my advice is to do it because the barrier to entry is lower than you’d expect. But prepare for the fact that building the thing is maybe 10% of the work and keeping it alive is the other 90%. And if your agent ghosts you after day one, welcome to the club.
This post is exploratory and does not represent a specific roadmap.
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Says enough about the author if they can't even setup a simple cron job.