The simple thing is the right thing

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I needed a cron job to rebuild my Vercel site daily. Scheduled publishing. Posts with a future publishDate become visible when their date passes.

I asked the agent how to set this up.

It gave me a bash script with environment variable handling, HTTP response code parsing, a separate log file, multi-step setup instructions, and a deploy hook approach that required going into the Vercel dashboard.

HOOK_URL="${VERCEL_DEPLOY_HOOK:-}"
LOG_FILE="/tmp/vercel-rebuild.log"

if [ -z "$HOOK_URL" ]; then
  echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') ERROR: VERCEL_DEPLOY_HOOK not set" >> "$LOG_FILE"
  exit 1
fi

response=$(curl -s -X POST "$HOOK_URL" -w "%{http_code}" -o /tmp/vercel-response.json)
# ... and so on

I asked: why these choices, over a simple at time, exec vercel --prod in this dir?

Simplicity on oceanheart.ai

The simple thing is the right thing