As the founder of Bakeoff, I spend my time on customer development and engineering architecture & review. RemainderBot solves two problems for me and I suspect for many others out there:
* There are many small tasks that require a few minutes of my time and need my context, but I just don’t have the mental energy to prioritize them, do a context shift, perform a small amount of work, and finalize the results a dozen times a day.
* Some weeks I don’t get close to my Claude and Codex subscription limits. That’s a waste of what are very valuable Astra and Opus 5.5 tokens :)!
RemainderBot has consistently used my goals and task lists to identify non-obvious tasks that would move me forward. It has accomplished quite a bit - 111 PRs including customer call prep, a census of 31 GitHub orgs’ agent setup files, and standalone prototypes to demo to engineers I meet with.
You interact with it in whatever interface you use with GitHub PRs. It uses your comments and decisions on whether to merge PRs to guide which kinds of tasks and approaches it takes in the future.
RemainderBot runs either as a manual process on your machine or as a cronjob on a server. In tick (cronjob) mode, it checks how much subscription quota is left and how much time there is until the weekly reset before picking a task and creating a PR.
Here’s how you get started:
* Check that git, claude (or codex), and gh CLIs exist and are authenticated on your machine
* Clone the openremainderbot repo:
git clone https://github.com/arimwilson/openremainderbot.git remainderbot
cd remainderbot
cp -n GOALS.example.md GOALS.md
cp -n sources.example.toml sources.toml
Edit those two files with your personal goals and with sources for your task lists, respectively. Finally: python3 -m remainderbot snapshot
python3 -m remainderbot run --provider claude --deadline-minutes 20 --size small
These commands will pick a task, work on it in a new branch, and will cost you a few percent of your weekly quota. Please drop a comment on what it did for you and if it got anything wrong here or in https://github.com/arimwilson/openremainderbot/discussions/6 :).More details in the blog post - https://www.ariwilson.com/writing/openremainderbot
Hope you enjoy it!