There is a court case that I am following. Developments are expected at some point in the next few months. I don’t want to be constantly checking, but I do want to know as soon as something happens: what’s a poor boy to do?
“Write a program, Matt: you do this for a living”
Yeeees, fair point, but right now I’m trying to limit how much of my brain is spent on coding outside work – I want to save that particular energy for the day job, where I’m learning functional programming: I’m even dreaming about monads. And I’ve got a long list of other, more interesting coding-requiring projects lined up for when I do feel like sparing the brain-space.
But, of course, nowadays we have LLMs on tap, and so the amount of effort to write simple programs like this has dropped dramatically. So I downloaded the OpenAPI spec for the “National Archives Find Case Law: Public API” from https://nationalarchives.github.io/ds-find-caselaw-docs/public, fed it to ChatGPT, and asked it to write a simple Python program that I could use to repeatedly query for cases of interest and email myself the links when something new cropped up.
A few iterations later, the result is at https://github.com/MatthewJohnMorris/case-monitor – I am running it every 12 hours via WIndows Task Scheduler and I can already feel the OCD monkey in my brain starting to calm down. Full instructions are in the README.md, also written by ChatGPT.
The hardest part was getting email sending working in a sane fashion without something bonkers like setting up my own SMTP relay: I tried a few different routes (again, with ChatGPT’s help). As of Dec25, using my GMail account as the mail relay for sending to my normal email is a simple, practical solution.