Tap. Print. Coffee. Done.

I tap my phone to a sticker on my office file cabinet.

Thirty seconds later, my printer spits out a piece of paper with my customized up to the minute morning brief on it.

Weather. Calendar. How I'm tracking against my goals. Inbox triage. Update on my Getting Things Done lists.

I grab a cup of coffee, walk outside, and read it. No phone. No screen. No notification pile-up.

That sticker cost me about a penny.

What's actually happening

NFC tags. You can buy 50 of them on Amazon for ten bucks. They've been sitting in my file cabinet for two years because I couldn't find a use that justified pulling them out.

I finally found one.

The tags pair with Apple Shortcuts. Tap the phone, fire a shortcut. Standard stuff.

Here's the new part — the shortcut sends an iMessage to my agent.

My agent is just Claude Code running in a terminal session on my Mac mini, with access to Obsidian and a bunch of tools I've given it.

So the tap becomes: "Run my morning brief."

The agent goes and grabs everything I've taught it to grab (via a skill file). Compiles it. Sends it to my printer.

I read it on paper. With coffee. Outside.

Why not just put it on a schedule?

Because I don't want it.

I don't want my morning brief showing up at 6 AM whether I'm ready or not. I don't want a notification pulling me back to a screen first thing. I don't want rigid automation dictating when my day starts.

The tap is the consent.

When I'm ready, I tap. The agent runs. The brief prints. That's it.

I have a second tag for my weekly GTD review. A third one to catch me up on inboxes. There's also a tag stuck to the printer itself — I scribble notes on the printed sheet, drop it back on the printer, tap that tag, and the whole thing gets scanned and fed back to my agent.

Paper in. Paper out. Digital in the middle.

This was todays… with a few redactions :)

The bigger thing

This isn't about NFC tags. NFC tags are stupid little stickers.

It's about how you interface with an agent.

Right now, most people interacting with AI are typing into a chat window. That's fine for you, the architect. You know what to ask. You know what NOT to ask.

But imagine giving every guy in your warehouse a phone number where they can willy-nilly text an agent with full tool access. Read Write to your CRM. TERRIFYING.

They could do some really crazy shit.

The agent has the keys to the castle and the interface has zero guardrails.

A vending machine doesn't ask you what you want. It has buttons!

NFC tags are buttons.

You can stick a tag on a piece of equipment. Tap to check it out. Tap to log a problem. Tap to take a screenshot of its current state and file it somewhere. The agent does the actual work — but the interface is bounded to exactly what you want that person doing.

That's a fundamentally different shape than "here's a chat window, godspeed."

What I'm noodling on

I'm going to spend a lot of time on this. Physical doorways into agent flows is where some interesting problems live.

Not because NFC is magic. It isn't. It's an old technology.

But because most people thinking about agents are stuck in the chat box. The chat box is one interface. The world is full of other ones — buttons, tags, cards, printers, scanners, doors, kiosks — and your agent doesn't care which one it's wired to.

Blend the offline and the online. Build the interface that fits the work.

Some things I want to do on a screen. Some things I want to do on paper, with coffee, outside.

The tag lets me choose.

Yallah Habibi,
Jon

P.S.

While we're on the subject of physical interfaces to your agents — my new Lazy Leverage episode is with Yossi from Monkey Wrench, who took one plumbing truck to 100+ employees in California (yes, California) and whose techs now wear Meta Ray-Bans on every service call, piping the video straight into Service Titan.

We get into why his CPA in the Philippines is more valuable after AI, not less, and why he's reinvesting every dollar of AI savings into customer experience instead of pocketing the OpEx.

It's the cleanest articulation I've heard of how leaders with real operational scars are going to eat the lunch of every "one-man company" Twitter influencer. Worth your time if you run home services — or you're trying to figure out where AI and global talent actually fit in a real operation.

Episode Link