There’s a cognitive bias called law of the instrument, which says “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. For me, that hammer has always been software programming. My first job was an administrative assistant at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’s Alumni Relations. I was given an excel spreadsheet of alumni contacts to filter through. Instead of doing it by hand which was expected, I wrote a VBA script to do it in a fraction of the time that it would have otherwise taken.
This trend continued and carried over to my latest job as a technical support agent for a web hosting company. In this capacity, I found myself copying and pasting a lot, and repeatedly performing certain tasks with what’s being copied. For example, one of the first things that was done with a domain name is to look up its DNS records using a tool called dig. Normally, this involves copying the domain, opening up or activating the command line prompt, and performing several dig lookups to determine the relevant records. It quickly became apparent that these and many other tasks are performed frequent enough that one could benefit from automating some of those actions.
This is how Agent Multitool came about. At the very basic level, Agent Multitool is a clipboard history app, giving you easy access to previously copied clipboard entries. But, it comes with perks. Agent Multitool will analyze the copied content, and based on that, offer you prepackaged actions that will speed up and optimize your workflows. You can read up more about it and download the app from here.