Automation

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Everyone’s selling you an AI tool in 2026. Every newsletter, every podcast, every X thread: “you NEED this in your stack.” I’ve tested more of these than I’d like to admit, and most of them are solving problems you don’t have. The useful question changed sometime last year. It used to be “can it do something cool?” Now it’s “does it actually save me time?” Those are different questions. A tool that generates impressive demos but requires 45 minutes of prompt engineering to get a usable output isn’t productivity; it’s a hobby. By my own accounting, the five tools that survived my 2026 cull cost $65-100/month combined and save me one to two hours a day. Everything else got cancelled. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been running AI agents for months, and the bill was the part that hurt the most. Not the setup, not the prompts — the raw token cost of letting a model plan, call tools, verify its own work, and loop. Agentic workflows eat tokens like a starving man at a buffet. So when Anthropic dropped Claude Sonnet 5 last week as a “cheaper way to run agents,” I had to find out if it actually changes the math. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I was paying a virtual assistant $500 a month for tasks I now handle with three AI tools for $56 total. That’s not a thought experiment — I tracked every task for two weeks, calculated the hours, and felt genuinely ill when I saw the annual number: $6,000 going toward work that followed templates and patterns rather than requiring human judgment. ...

🎧 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 disappeared in the first three months of 2026. Microsoft let go of 15,000 people; Intel cut 24,000. A ResumeBuilder survey that same quarter found 58% of companies planned more layoffs, with most pointing to AI-driven restructuring as the reason. But a CNBC report from early 2026 revealed a twist: employers who cited AI as the reason for cuts are already reversing course, because they fired the people needed to run the very systems they just bought. ...

🎧 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 used to think Apple Shortcuts was for people who dreamed in code. I’d open the app, see the blank canvas of triggers and actions, and immediately feel like I was in over my head. That all changed with iOS 27. Now, I just describe what I want in plain English, and Apple Intelligence builds the workflow for me. If you’ve been curious about automation but intimidated by the complexity, this is the update that finally makes it accessible. The new iOS 27 Shortcuts AI actions are a game-changer. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve spent months testing AI agents, and nearly all of them assume you’re comfortable in a terminal. Anthropic just released something for everyone else. It’s called Cowork, it runs inside the Claude desktop app, and it can read, edit, and create files on your computer based on instructions you type in plain English. ...

I spent last Tuesday morning watching a coworker spend 40 minutes scrolling through Slack to find a single client quote from three weeks ago. When I told him Slackbot could have found it in ten seconds, he didn’t believe me. That’s when I realized most people in our workspace had no idea what Slackbot became after Salesforce’s 2026 rebuild. The old Slackbot set reminders and responded to a handful of preset commands. New Slackbot is a different product entirely, powered by Anthropic’s Claude model. It understands natural language, summarizes conversations, searches across your messages and connected apps like Google Drive and Salesforce, drafts replies, and takes actions in tools — all from inside your Slack conversation. No extra install needed if your workspace runs on a paid Slack plan. ...

🎧 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. ...