Your First Real Workflow

Turn a one-off prompt into a workflow that runs again tomorrow: role, files, routine, report.

One great answer is luck. A workflow is an answer you can get again tomorrow without re-explaining anything. This guide rebuilds a real use case — the daily YouTube recap — as a template you can apply to anything you follow: newsletters, price drops, competitors, GitHub releases.

The four parts of a durable workflow

1. A role that says what the bot is. One or two lines. “You are Recap, my media watcher.” Not a personality essay — a job title and a scope.

2. Files that hold state. Two files cover 90% of cases:

• a config file — what to watch, rules, preferences (channels.md)
• a state file — what has already been handled (seen.md)

Files beat “remember this” because memory drifts; files don’t. The bot can re-read them every run, and you can audit and edit them like any document.

3. A routine with a quiet-day rule. Schedule it and tell it what to do when there is nothing to say:

Every day at 7am, check the channels in channels.md for new
videos in the last 24 hours. Summarize only the ones not yet
in seen.md. If nothing is new, send exactly: "No new videos."

4. A report format you will actually read. The format is the product. Ours:

For each new video:
- channel + title
- 3 bullets on what it actually says
- one line on why I'd care
- the link
Order by relevance to my interests. Keep it under one screen.

Notice what is not there: no walls of text, no pleasantries, no summaries of things you already saw.

The setup interview

Good workflows don’t guess your preferences — they ask first:

Before we start, interview me: what topics do I care about, which channels do I already follow? Suggest 2-3 more based on my interests and let me approve or reject them. Then save the final list to channels.md.

This pattern — interview, confirm, save — turns a demo into a system. You will see it in most of the curated prompts on this site.

Adapt it to anything

Swap the surface, keep the skeleton:

Where people overshoot

• Too many sources on day one. Start with 5-7; expand when the report is still readable.
• No state file. Without seen.md, everything looks new forever and you stop trusting the report.
• No quiet-day rule. Noise trains you to ignore the bot, and then the signal dies with it.

When your first workflow has run cleanly for a week, you are ready for the fun part: installing bots other people built, or teaching your bot to call tools.