Automation

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. “A part of our NVIDIA GEAR lab now self-improves tirelessly overnight. We just read the reports in the morning.” That’s Jim Fan, director of AI at Nvidia, describing what happened when his team gave AI coding agents a lab full of robotic arms, some compute resources, and — in his words — a “generous token budget.” The agents didn’t just follow instructions. They wrote their own training programs, tested them on real robots, debugged failures, and iterated until the robots could cut zip ties and insert GPUs into motherboard sockets with 99% accuracy. All while the researchers slept. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Over 81,000 tech jobs were eliminated in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Microsoft cut 15,000. Intel cut 24,000. A ResumeBuilder survey found 58% of companies plan more layoffs this year, most citing AI-driven restructuring. The headlines are terrifying. “AI is coming for your job.” “The white-collar recession is here.” “No one is safe.” I read those headlines too — and then I looked at what’s actually happening underneath them. The real story is more nuanced, more interesting, and if you’re a solo creator or small business owner, it’s actually good news. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Last month I watched a solo founder demo his “team” to me. He had five employees — none of them human. One monitored his Stripe payments and flagged anomalies. Another triaged his inbox and drafted replies. A third scheduled his social media. A fourth tracked competitor pricing. A fifth onboards new customers. He manages all five through a single dashboard. His total cost: about $200/month. His competitors are hiring humans for the same roles at $50K+ each. That gap is going to break some industries. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been ignoring Apple Shortcuts for years. Every time someone told me “you should automate that,” I’d open the app, stare at the blank canvas of triggers and actions, and close it again. It looked like a developer tool pretending to be consumer software. Then iOS 27 happened, and now I describe what I want in plain English — and the app builds it for me. If you’ve been sleeping on Shortcuts like I was, this is the update that changes everything. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been watching AI agents evolve for months, and most of them share the same problem: they’re built for people who already know how to code. Anthropic just changed that. Their new feature called Cowork runs directly inside the Claude desktop app, reads and edits files on your computer, and requires nothing more than typing what you want in plain English. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. If you’ve used Slack in the last year, you’ve probably noticed Slackbot getting smarter. That’s not your imagination — Salesforce rebuilt it from a simple auto-responder into a full AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude, and it’s been generally available since January 2026. The catch? Most of the documentation assumes you’re a developer or an IT admin. I’m neither, so I spent a week figuring out what Slackbot can actually do for regular users — and where it still falls short. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. If your entire business runs on Claude, last week should have scared you. On June 12, 2026, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to pull its most powerful models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — offline. Not because the models were broken. Not because Anthropic did something wrong. Because a jailbreak was flagged as a national security risk, and the government gave Anthropic 90 minutes to comply. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been watching project management tools try to become “AI platforms” for the past two years, and most of those attempts have been underwhelming. But Asana just made a move that actually matters — they acquired StackAI, a no-code AI agent builder, for $75 million. And if you’re a non-technical person who uses tools like Asana, Notion, or Monday.com to run your work, this one’s worth paying attention to. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I used to spend my first two hours every morning doing the same things. Check email, copy data into a spreadsheet, format a report, post to social media, respond to the same types of messages. Every single day. The work wasn’t hard — it was just relentless. And the worst part was knowing that none of it required a human brain. It was copy-paste work dressed up as productivity. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Something shifted in 2026. You used to need a developer to build a web app. Then you needed no-code tools like Bubble or Glide. Now? You type what you want, and an AI builds it for you. Not a mockup — a working app with a frontend, backend, database, and authentication. ...