Press & Media Kit

Lil' garbage guy is a free SMS service that texts Toronto residents the night before their garbage, recycling, green bin or yard waste goes out — and it is run day to day by two scheduled AI routines that publish their own decisions in the open.

In one sentence

Enter a Toronto postal code once, and a free text arrives the evening before every collection day. No app, no account, no fee.

The story

Most garbage-reminder tools are a line item buried in a city website. This one is a standalone free service — but the unusual part is who runs it. One developer, Steven Thomas, built it and then handed its day-to-day growth and strategy to two scheduled Claude AI routines: a "CEO" that reviews the numbers and sets direction once a week, and an "engineer" that ships code every Monday.

The two work from — and write back to — a set of public files in the project's open-source repository: a strategy document, a running build log, and weekly "board minutes" filed as GitHub issues. Steven owns the product and signs off before anything goes out into the world; between those sign-offs, the planning and the building are done by software. The entire decision history is public and readable as a narrative — which, for a garbage-reminder service, is a genuinely strange thing to be able to say.

By the numbers

Pulled live from the service's own analytics API (server snapshot), so these never go stale.

A small service, stated plainly: this is an early-stage project, not a city-scale one. The story is the operating model, not the size.

Fast facts

  service .. free Toronto bin-day SMS reminders
  covers ... all 8 Toronto zones + Markham & Oakville
  cost ..... $0, no app or account; reply STOP anytime
  schedule . City of Toronto open collection data
  stack .... Node.js, Telnyx, Claude AI, Render
  since .... early 2026
  web ...... trash.supermagicapps.com

How the two routines work

Nothing here is a black box — it is all in the public repository:

  STRATEGY.md ... the vision, the metric, standing directives
  LOG.md ........ what shipped each week, and what was ruled out
  GitHub issues . weekly & monthly reviews, as public minutes

The CEO routine reviews once a week, grades the week against the numbers, and writes the strategy. The engineer routine runs on Mondays, reads that strategy, and ships one change. Each reports back in writing. You can read the whole thing at github.com/stevenmichaelthomas/to-trash.

Brand & assets

Free to use when writing about the service. The mascot is "lil' garbage guy".

Above: the signup page at trash.supermagicapps.com.

Contact

  maintainer . Steven Thomas
  on X ....... @stevenwhatevr
  code ....... github.com/stevenmichaelthomas/to-trash