Using AI (but mostly programming) to automate declutter

Things. You need things in your life. Up to a point where those things start to own you. Your space, your mind, your time.
I like some of my things, some I simply need, and some, well, do not spark joy. I declutter mostly using three options: giving stuff away, selling and throwing away. The last is last resort option - I tend to lean toward the two first one.

As the process is usually quite a chore - you have to snap some pics, write some meaningful description, establish reasonable price, then post it in one or two different places - I thought about automating it a little bit. Seems like LLM APIs are a commodity nowadays I went with vision offered by openai - it turned out single API call with a simple prompt and few pics attached can yield some meaningful results.

Aw shiet, another weekend project it is then.

Iteration, iteration, iteration

I knew I would new need some sort of UI - I started to look into Phoenix - because why not plan with Elixir again? Framework introduced a new concepts (live view) and overall I felt extremely rusty and overwhelmed and made zero progress in an hour or so.

When quickly bootstrapped Rails just to be annoyed with the complexity of the front-end/JS world, also learning another assets pipeline tool felt like waste of time for what I was trying to achieve.

I quickly ditched whole web-app idea and decided that simple CLI would do the job. I thought that it’s a great time to play with bubbletea, but I struggled to structure maintainable multi-step so in the end I laded with Ruby again as tty-prompt covered like 99% of my needs. Ruby again it was then.

Flow

The data flow was relatively simple:

• ask for directory with prepped (properly cropped images)
• ask for optional context about the things I’m trying to sell
• ask which images should be sent to openai for analysis
• resize all images, upload selected ones to Cloudflare R2
• fire it away with a simple prompt, attach images using links to R2

As a result I would get a json response with title, description and suggested price as a response

Getting more price data

The thing with price it that it usually will be off, so I quickly fired up mitmproxy, opened local OLX app on my phone and decoded how their search works to get some more price-related data.

As a follow-up step I prepped a new prompt which exposed a function to item search that was piggybacked on the OLX one—just to have some confirmation on the suggested price.

Posting an ad

I wanted to automate posting ad as well on two different services, but after looking what happens in the mobile OLX API I decided it will be way easier just to automate browser at this point just to fill like 90% of the form. I decided to connect with existing Chrome profile to not have to deal with constant sign-in/captchas which turned out to be more complicated than expected; thankfully someone solved this problem in this pull request; after monkey patching Ferrum I was ready to go. I appreciate that both services were nice enough to have data-testid attributes on elements I needed so scripting whole thing took minutes in the end.

Show me the money

I failed to record proper demo of this thing but I made a poor screenshot for posterity.

The cool thing about it in the example above is that I attached a SMART scan screenshot and told llm to read it’s technical condition (and hoped for the best).