QOTD — Quote of the Day

A small Discord bot that posts a daily quote, written by one of three recurring characters who each have their own voice, posting habits, and — once in a while — conversations with each other. Runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero.

It's deliberately more than a quote-poster: the characters have persistent memory (so they don't repeat themselves), schedule themselves by personality (the Plug owns weekends, the Postman skips them), and occasionally break the routine to talk to each other in short, narrated scenes.

The cast

• The Quote Dealer — noir, spare, the canonical voice. Posts in the evenings, tracking actual dusk.
• The Quote Plug — chronically online, brainrot, covers when the Dealer's off. Never before noon; lives for the weekend.
• The Quote Postman — plain, honest, observational. Working hours only, never on weekends.

How it works

Two cron jobs. A planner runs each morning and decides the whole day — who posts, when (a random time inside each character's own rhythm), and the rare interaction days — writing it all to a plan file. A dispatch process wakes every minute and posts whatever's due, generating the quote at send time with the character's recent quotes injected so it stays fresh.

planner.py  (07:00)        → state/plan-YYYY-MM-DD.json
dispatch.py (every minute) → reads the plan, generates, posts to Discord

Quotes come from the OpenAI API; posts go out through Discord webhooks (one per character). No other external services.

Setup

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate            # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env                 # then fill in your keys/webhooks

.env needs an OPENAI_API_KEY and the three character webhooks. The admin and storyteller webhooks are optional. See .env.example.

Try it without waiting for the scheduler

python preview.py quote                       # a real quote, printed
python preview.py interaction --cast plug,dealer   # a full scene
python preview.py pipeline --dry              # the whole pipeline, nothing sent

Run it for real (on the Pi)

0 7 * * *  cd /path/to/qotd && /path/to/qotd/.venv/bin/python planner.py
* * * * *  cd /path/to/qotd && /path/to/qotd/.venv/bin/python dispatch.py

Tuning

Almost everything lives in registry.yaml — the model, posting weights per day and hour, quiet hours, interaction frequency, and location (for the dusk calculation). Each character's voice is a markdown file in agents/. Adding a character is one yaml block, one markdown file, and one webhook.