Automation

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been running AI agents to automate parts of my workflow — scheduling, content drafts, data pulls — and until last week, I never thought twice about what permissions those agents actually have. Then I read a study that made me audit every single one. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been watching the “AI agent” hype cycle for months now, and I finally found data that confirms what I suspected: most of what companies call “agents” are just chatbots wearing a costume. A new VentureBeat survey of 101 enterprises found that 71% of deployed “agents” are single-prompt wrappers — not the multi-step, tool-calling workflows the marketing implies. If you’re a solo builder trying to figure out which AI tools are actually worth your time, this is the most useful thing I’ve read all month. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Last week, Cognition — the company behind the AI coding assistant Devin — acquired Poke, an AI agent you text like a friend. The deal valued Poke in the “low nine figures,” which is a lot of money for an AI that uses slang and makes jokes. But it tells you something about where AI tools are heading: personality is becoming a feature, not a decoration. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Anthropic just found something inside Claude that nobody expected — a hidden layer of “words” the model uses to think, but never shows you. If you build with AI tools, this changes more than you’d expect. I covered the initial J-space discovery when it first broke — what it is, how Anthropic found it, and why the MIT Technology Review called mechanistic interpretability one of 2026’s breakthrough technologies. That post was the “what.” This one is the “so what.” Because the real question isn’t whether Anthropic found something cool — it’s what you should actually do differently on Monday morning. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. You know that feeling when you open your laptop every morning and spend the first 45 minutes doing the exact same things? Checking the same dashboards, pulling the same reports, drafting the same type of follow-up email. I’ve been there. And when ChatGPT Work launched a couple weeks ago, most people focused on the “give it a goal and walk away” pitch. But there’s a feature buried inside that’s even more useful for solo operators: Scheduled Tasks — the ability to tell an AI to do something every day, every week, or whenever a condition triggers, without you lifting a finger. If you’ve been following the Codex-to-Work merger, this is the piece that actually changes your daily routine. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. If you’ve been following the ChatGPT Work launch from two weeks ago, you already know the pitch: give it a goal, walk away, come back to finished work. What nobody’s talking about is what happens between “walk away” and “finished work” — specifically, how much of your plan’s credits disappear in the process. I’ve been stress-testing ChatGPT Work since launch day, and there are three things I wish someone had told me before I handed it my first real task. ...

I used to think automation meant scheduling emails. Then I set up my first OpenAI automation through ChatGPT Work, and it was like hiring a ghost employee who never sleeps. This isn’t about a smarter chatbot. It’s about assigning a job, closing your laptop, and coming back to finished work. I’m talking about pulling sales data from Google Drive, formatting it into a chart, and posting a summary to Slack—all while I’m stuck in a meeting I didn’t need to attend. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. When OpenAI launched its Codex hardware a few weeks ago — a physical macro pad that triggers AI coding actions with a button press — it felt like a novelty. A cool gadget for people who already used Codex. But something bigger was happening underneath. OpenAI was in the middle of consolidating every AI tool it makes into a single product. And if you’ve been using ChatGPT for quick questions, you might not have noticed that the ground shifted under you. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. When we covered Chrome’s AI browsing feature back in May, the pitch was straightforward: highlight text, right-click, let Gemini summarize or research for you. Useful, but passive — it only worked when you were sitting in front of the browser. Google just dropped something fundamentally different. Gemini Spark is an AI agent that runs 24/7 in the background, connects to your entire Google workspace, and handles multi-step tasks while you’re offline. If Chrome’s AI feature was a smart assistant at your desk, Spark is an employee who never clocks out. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Two years ago, choosing between Zapier and Make was simple: Zapier was easier, Make was cheaper, and you picked based on your budget. In 2026, the decision is more complicated — and more interesting. Zapier has reinvented itself as an AI orchestration platform, while Make has doubled down on being the best visual workflow builder on the market. They’re no longer competing on the same axis. If you’ve been going back and forth between them, this is the breakdown I wish someone had given me. ...