I know what you mean–I frequently go in and trim it down!
Theoretically (AFAIK), this board is strictly for discussing adding features to Audacity’s code, not extending Audacity’s ability via outside apps. Controlling Audacity via AutoIt is not on topic here.
If I posted code changes to the Audacity code-base to make Audacity do a new trick (f.i. recording to a schedule) it would be topical here.
The concept here is we really have two topics–changing Audacity’s code internally to somehow accomplish your goal and driving Audacity via an external scripting system. How about this, for the AutoIt stuff I will start a new topic over in General Audio Programming:
which I will flesh out as I go (I will need to figure out the details as I have never used Task Scheduler).
For the CLI-based stuff I refer any interested reader to the thread:
where I show how to add new CLI switches. Anyone interested in going this route should first get Audacity compiling and running then follow the steps to get new CLI switches working. Ask me questions as needed up to that point; adding the start & stop switches is really trivial once you get that far.