Notes · June 12, 2026
The grocery list that fills itself
Yesterday I had some unexpected free time and ended up building my first everyday AI automation.
It started with a simple family problem: remembering everything we needed before our weekly grocery store run.
Now, during the week, anyone can say “add milk” or “we need yogurt” and the item is automatically added to a shared Notion shopping database. To keep things consistent, the automation checks against our Master List of products we regularly buy rather than adding random items. Every Friday, a scheduled workflow reads the list and updates our grocery store cart. After shopping, one click clears everything for the next week.
The implementation was actually more interesting than the use case itself. It combines Claude, MCP servers, Notion, TickTick, browser automation, and scheduled workflows. Getting all the pieces to work together reliably—and handling existing cart items correctly—took more effort than I expected, but that’s usually where the learning happens.
Next, I want to expand this beyond shopping lists and explore how AI can help with meal planning, household routines, and other small decisions that take up more time than they should.
And yes, at some point I’ll probably put a camera in the fridge and let AI figure out what’s missing before I do.