How Eric built a Living Agent that keeps him connected to Italy’s local food festivals.

Eric loves discovering sagres. He created an autonomous system that brings him closer to his love for food festivals.

In Italy, local food festivals are known as sagre.

They are community celebrations, often dedicated to a regional dish, ingredient, or tradition.

But finding them takes work. Information is fragmented across different municipalities, sites, and platforms. Even after finding an event, Eric still has to check the date, confirm the location, and add it to his calendar.

“I wanted an agent that finds local food festivals near where I live.”

From a simple idea to a daily helper

Eric created a dedicated Living Brain, built a dedicated agent, connected his Google Calendar, and scheduled it to check a few local information sites every day.

“It checks every morning and adds new events to my calendar.”

Then he noticed a gap. Some of the best information about upcoming sagres came from a particular platform that would not have appeared traditionally on Google Search or websites. Eric challenged his agent to help him with better compilation, and it paid off:

For Eric, the agent was a scouting companion who opened new doors to experiencing sagres.

“Staying connected to something I already enjoy”

While we often think of AI as a way to handle work, automate repetitive tasks, or administration, Eric’s story presents a unique possibility: Like virtual assistants, an AI agent can be expansive, helping us stay closer to the things we already enjoy but do not always have time to keep up with.

In Eric’s experience, he was able to be a better scout for sagres with his Living Brain helping to remember his preferences, context, and memory of places visited.

What started as a passion project to “find me local food festivals” became a daily helper that kept Eric informed, enabling him to discover more and go live out moments that make life interesting.

Eric’s recipe for the best agent who sniffs out the best food festivals:

“Watching an agent go from “find me the local food festivals and add them to my calendar, oh here’s a URL to scrape IG, figure it out” to a working scraping + OCR + calendar pipeline that self-corrects over time, entirely on its own, is genuinely one of the coolest things I’ve seen ChatChat do. This thing is unreal!”

A dedicated brain, an agent, and a connected Google Calendar, and one daily task

A simple daily scheduled task set up: pointing it at a few local info sites to check

If the Instagram connector cannot read social accounts as per Meta policy, give the agent the URL of a social media scraping service
Connect with Agent Computer which writes its own script to pull the latest posts on IG
Every day it checks local sites and that Instagram account, reads captions, downloads post images including full carousels, and even extracts frames from video
Runs OCR on everything, dedupes against what’s already on the calendar, and sends a telegram summary at the end
Self-corrections, as Eric experienced:
- Suggested tweaking the scheduled task to run more efficiently
- Pinned posts on the Instagram account were causing issues, caught that and fixed it
- Media URLs were expiring before they got processed, caught that too
- Video detection wasn’t working consistently, fixed
- OCR running twice on the same content, fixed
- Basically debugged its own pipeline over two days of usage
- Started using Google Places on its own to cross-check addresses pulled out of OCR, since some were vague

Never miss another hidden find with ChatChat

ChatChat Stories: The Sagre Scout