Tales from the Software Factory: The Cron and the VM

A developer initially created a scheduled CI test to detect when an LLM gateway’s model list no longer matched a provider’s list and notify the team through Slack, but reconsidered the approach because it required humans to complete the resulting maintenance work. They replaced it with a continuously deployed bot running on an exe.dev virtual machine that generates a proposed configuration diff and provides a button to submit the change through the existing CI/CD pipeline. The experience illustrates a shift from using bots merely to send reminders toward designing them to carry tasks as near to completion as possible, with inexpensive, customizable VM-based bot services offering a more suitable way to maintain state than CI jobs.

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