We’re remodeling, and our architect asked for Pinterest boards with inspiration photos so they’d know what we actually like. Reasonable ask. Except I know myself: give me an open Pinterest search bar and no deadline, and I will surface forty minutes later having pinned a lot of very pretty kitchens with zero memory of what I was originally looking for. I don’t have that kind of time right now, and I didn’t want to lose an evening to it.
So instead of opening Pinterest myself, I wrote down what I actually
want in one file, home-style.md: warm
neutral tones, mid-century lines, natural materials, light matte wood,
nothing too glossy, plus a running list of things to filter out even
if they’re trending (light grey velvet, anything too pale given two
kids in the house). Then I had Bo search Pinterest against that
document instead of me scrolling.
The point wasn’t “get a robot to use Pinterest for me” as a novelty. The point was turning an open-ended, rabbit-hole-shaped task into a bounded one: here are the rules, bring me back a short list that follows them, and don’t show me the rest.
How the search-and-filter pass actually works
For each style term in home-style.md (warm neutral kitchen, mid
century living room, natural wood built-ins, etc.), Bo runs a Pinterest
search, pulls candidate pin IDs off the results grid, and checks each
one against the filter rules before saving anything. A pin that’s the
right room but the wrong palette gets skipped. A pin that’s on-palette
but includes a product I’ve already said no to gets skipped too. Only
matches on every rule get saved to the board.
One real gotcha worth naming: Pinterest’s save button saves to whatever board you used last, not the one you meant, unless you open the board picker first and choose explicitly. First run, that put a chunk of saves in the wrong place before I caught it and fixed the flow to always pick the board by name.
What I ended up with: a board that actually matches our taste instead of “everything Pinterest’s algorithm thinks a kitchen remodel should look like,” built without me touching Pinterest at all. Our architect gets a clean board. I get my evening back.
If you want to see what else falls into the “automate the tedious part” bucket for us, the projects page has everything grouped together.