Hold the presses, Goats. The Tech Desk has a scoop, and for once it isn’t about who reprogrammed the library computer to say “GREETINGS, PROFESSOR” at startup. This one is about software agents: AI programs you hand an assignment to, and that then work through the steps on their own. They open web pages, download files, run tools and write up what they found, checking in with a human at the end instead of at every turn.
Agents like these are turning up in more and more places. Ours has a very unglamorous beat: city council paperwork. James Hayter built an agent workflow that visits public records portals, pulls down every agenda, packet and set of minutes in a date range, and turns each agenda item into one record in a small database. Then it prints the whole thing up as a report, like a yearbook for municipal government.
We read two of those reports for this issue: one for the City of Leavenworth (read the Leavenworth tracker, PDF) and one for the City of Cashmere (read the Cashmere tracker, PDF). Below are excerpts, quoted straight from the reports, plus a peek at how they were put together.
The assignment sheet
“Nearly autonomous” is doing real work in this story. A person sets the assignment, the agent does the legwork, and the person reviews the result and decides what to do with it. The ground rules are printed right at the top of each report’s README:
Built from public documents only, in a read-only way: no one was contacted, no records were requested, and no email was sent.
Leavenworth and Cashmere tracker READMEs
Here is the legwork, as the README files and tool folders describe it:
- It downloads the posted PDFs from each city’s website. Cashmere’s site blocks plain download requests, so the agent fetches those documents through a headless Chrome browser.
- It pulls the text out with pdftotext. Many Cashmere pages are scans, so those also get OCR (optical character recognition, the trick that turns a picture of words back into words).
- It writes one card per agenda item into items.json and one record per meeting into meetings.json.
- It renders a PDF report with a meeting index, recurring themes, a list of source problems and the cards.
Show your work: one card per item
Every card answers the same newspaper questions. The Leavenworth report explains the format plainly:
Who = presenters, movers and seconders as recorded. What = the item’s substance. How = action, vote and outcome.
Leavenworth tracker, report intro (report_meta.json)
Here is a real card from the Leavenworth Council’s March 10, 2026 legislative meeting, on Ordinance 1720:
- Who: Council (motion Bedard, second Hessburg)
- How: Motion passed 5-1 (Reister opposed).
- Why: Agenda: consistent with Comprehensive Plan housing goals, the Housing Action Plan and the Growth Management Act; creates aesthetic compatibility in residential neighborhoods.
- Note: The agenda text dates the Council hearing “February 24, 2025”; the hearing was held Feb 24, 2026 per the minutes.
See that note? The agent didn’t quietly fix the year. It wrote the date down the way the source printed it and flagged the mismatch. Every card also links back to the document it came from, often down to the page.
Honor Roll: by the numbers
- Leavenworth: Council meetings from Jan 1 to Oct 23, 2026. That’s 41 meeting records, 4 of them cancelled, and 199 item cards.
- Cashmere: City Council and Planning Commission meetings from Jan 1, 2025 to Oct 25, 2026. That’s 61 meetings (42 Council, 19 Planning Commission) and 364 cards, plus 10 look-ahead cards for the Oct 26, 2026 Council agenda.
- Minutes still missing: In Leavenworth, the two Oct 13, 2026 meetings had no minutes at all. In Cashmere, 9 meetings in the coverage period had no posted minutes, and for 4 of those (all Council meetings) draft minutes turned up in later packets.
Red-pen corner: what the agent caught
Any good copy editor keeps a red pencil handy. These reports keep a running list of source problems, and they record each one instead of silently correcting it. A few favorites:
The ordinance in the packet (p. 21) is numbered 1343; the agenda and minutes print 1334, the number of the Jan 27, 2025 unauthorized-use ordinance.
Cashmere tracker, card note, City Council, Feb 23, 2026
No Apr 7, 2025 minutes available (the posted file is the Apr 1, 2024 minutes); outcome not documented.
Cashmere tracker, Planning Commission cards, Apr 7, 2025
The Oct 2026 packet’s agenda page reads “Monday October 5, 2025” for the Oct 5, 2026 meeting.
Cashmere tracker, Planning Commission data notes
The Jan 27, 2026 study session minutes give the call-to-order time as ‘5:3X PM’.
Leavenworth tracker, data notes
That last one is our pick for Most Mysterious Minute. The report doesn’t guess what X stands for, and neither will we.
What the agent can’t do (how to read these reports)
- It can’t read minutes that don’t exist. When minutes aren’t posted, the card describes the agenda item and stops. Outcomes are never inferred. The card for Leavenworth’s Oct 13, 2026 Comprehensive Plan ordinance says: “Minutes not yet posted; outcome not stated in any available source.”
- Drafts stay labeled as drafts. When draft minutes show up inside a later meeting’s packet, the cards use them and say so.
- OCR makes mistakes. Scanned pages can lose digits, names and whole lines. The Cashmere report says: “Lines the OCR dropped (motions, attendance columns) were checked against page images, and cards note when that was done.”
- Typos are kept as printed. If the city printed the wrong number or year, the report shows it that way and adds a note.
- A human still has to review it. These reports are summaries for educational purposes, not official records. If something matters to you, click through to the source document, which is why every card links to one.
Go to the source
The original documents are public, and you can read them yourself:
- City of Leavenworth City Clerk page (minutes, resolutions and ordinances)
- City of Cashmere Council meeting agendas and packets
So, is the robot hall monitor coming for the student council? Not this semester. What it does well is the tedious part: opening every file, carding every item, and writing down every printed “1334” that should say 1343. Deciding what any of it means is still homework for people. Class dismissed.