Day 1 AGAIN 🤪: First Workflow - #AISChallenge - Using Free AI

As promised I completed the same task using Opencode and their free AI model "Big Pickle"

What I built: An automated newsletter that writes itself, wraps it all in a slick dark-theme email, and sends it — all in one command.

One thing I learned: OAuth scopes are a nightmare. Google silently drops permissions during token refresh if your consent screen isn't configured exactly right. I spent half the day debugging a token that kept reverting to gmail-only access — turns out the Gmail client was loading the token with a subset of scopes, which nuked the others on refresh. The fix: every service that touches the token needs to request ALL the scopes, not just the ones it needs. Classic "one line fix, four hours of debugging" energy.

One thing I'd improve: I'd love to add RSS feed monitoring so the newsletter automatically picks up trending topics throughout the week instead of me manually picking one. Basically let it surf the news on its own and come back with a draft ready to go — true "set it and forget it" mode.

Big Pickle is actually legit. While I was yelling and swearing at it, it created the whole pipeline, fixed the bugs, and got the system running. Not bad for a free model going up against the big guns. One just needs to give some extra info.

5 comments

Day 1 AGAIN 🤪: First Workflow - #AISChallenge - Using Free AI