Automation

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Meta’s Q2 earnings call that he thinks it’s “extremely unlikely” that in five years, billions of people won’t have a personal AI agent working on their behalf 24/7. Finance, health, relationships, household management — the whole thing. Most people heard a tech CEO making grand predictions. I heard a starting gun. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Cyera, a data security company valued at $12 billion, signed a letter of intent to acquire Oasis Security for roughly $1 billion. The target: non-human identities — the API keys, tokens, and service accounts that AI agents use to act on a company’s behalf. Cyera raised $600 million recently and has passed $150 million in annual recurring revenue; Oasis raised about $195 million to chase this one problem. If you run AI agents in your own business, even as a solo builder, this deal is a signal worth reading. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Perplexity brought its “Personal Computer” AI agent to Windows after launching on Mac in April 2026. Unlike a chatbot that hands you text to copy, it operates your actual machine: opening files, editing Word documents, updating Excel spreadsheets, and chaining those steps into multi-point workflows, all through one conversation. I’ve been testing it, and the short version is this: genuinely useful for document-heavy admin work, but at $200/month (Perplexity Max) you need to know exactly what time it saves you. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. You’ve been using ChatGPT or Claude for months. Every prompt goes to someone else’s server, gets processed, and comes back. It works great until you hit the usage cap, or until you realize your private business data is being sent to a company you don’t fully control. That’s when you start wondering: can I just run this thing on my own machine? ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. If you’ve ever tried to build an AI agent that browses the web, you’ve hit the wall: running a full browser for every agent session is expensive, slow, and overkill for what the agent actually needs. Cloudflare just built something that might change the equation — a browser engine from scratch that’s designed for machines, not people. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Microsoft just announced its AI and Agent Platform as a full enterprise stack — build, ground, govern, and operate agents at scale with security, compliance, and Responsible AI tooling. That’s great if you have a team of 50 engineers and a seven-figure budget. But what if you’re one person trying to build something that actually works? ...

Update August 2026: recent developments in meta ai may affect the information in this post — see details below. 🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been paying for ChatGPT Plus and testing Claude for months. They’re both solid — but last week Meta quietly rolled out something that made me rethink my entire AI stack. Meta AI can now manage your calendar, run recurring tasks on autopilot, and do research you can steer in real time. And it’s free. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Every AI tool you use today — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — belongs to a company. They set the prices, they control the data, and they can change the rules whenever they want. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after writing about how AI agents are becoming employees — the more we depend on these systems, the more power their owners have. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Sudo make me a sandwich. That XKCD comic is over a decade old, and DoorDash just made it real. They launched dd-cli — a command-line tool that lets developers order food directly from their AI agents. Read Slack, parse JSON, run Python, recover from errors, calculate totals… just to order three salads. The demo video even displays “Flibbertigibbeting” as the status. It’s hilarious. It’s also the most important signal solo builders have gotten in months. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. A luxury phone maker just put a $6,880 price tag on an AI agent that runs on free, open-source software. And honestly? The agent itself is more interesting than the phone. If you’re building with AI tools and watching the agent hype cycle unfold, Vertu’s Alphafold is a case study in what happens when you wrap commodity AI in premium branding — and what solo builders can learn from both the clever parts and the failures. ...