I Hired a Sloth to Read My GitHub Inbox While I Sleep

Description and use

Sloth FM automatically processes GitHub notifications overnight, categorizes them, and delivers a concise audio summary with links, reducing manual review and improving efficiency.

Problem

GitHub notifications were overwhelming and often irrelevant, causing important items to be missed.

Outcome

Sloth FM reduced manual notification review time to ~2.3 min of compute, correctly identified 57 out of 76 notifications via code, and had Gemma judge the remaining 19, producing a clear audio summary that highlighted only the truly actionable items.

Workflow

• Run Gemma 3 locally to judge notifications that need human judgment
• Use GitHub CLI to fetch notifications and store in SQLite
• Code filters obvious cases (CI passes, releases, merged PRs)
• Gemma processes remaining notifications, outputting JSON with bucket, urgency, reason, and spoken sentence
• Temporal workflow orchestrates activities, ensuring charger presence, durability, and query/signal support
• Kokoro voice reads the morning show, linking to a page of actionable URLs

Evidence

Gemma 3 running locally

Source

Kokoro (an open‑weight voice) reads you a short radio show

Source

Temporal durability

Source

Gemma marked 41 of 75 notifications as "needs you"

Source