Real-world stories from running a full-time AI assistant.
1 new customer in 5 weeks. That’s what my funnel audit found. My homepage had a category page in the middle of the path to purchase. The idea: let visitors browse by topic. What actually happened: that’s where they stopped. My AI traced the full purchase flow and cross-referenced the traffic data. What it flagged:…
I’ve been selling books on Amazon since 2008. That’s 18 years of monthly royalty reports sitting in my account—and I’d never once looked at all of them together. Last week I asked my AI assistant to change that. It pulled 16 months of detailed reports, cross-referenced them against my lifetime numbers, and gave me a…
Three weeks ago I boarded a cruise ship. My AI assistant has been running my business ever since. Here’s what it actually did while I was eating dinner on deck: Compiled the monthly newsletter: 7 news stories found, click-tracking redirects set up, book cover images uploaded to avoid broken URLs, preview emailed to me for…
Amazon announced yesterday that OpenAI’s models, Codex, and Managed Agents are coming to AWS Bedrock. The pitch: GPT-5.5 running inside your existing AWS environment, with enterprise security, governance, and billing already wired up. Plus pre-built agents that can handle multi-step workflows. Sounds great until you look at what it takes. Bedrock Managed Agents require API…
Every business with a website has this problem: content that looked fine when you wrote it, silently broken years later. Old pricing. Dead links. Expired promotions. Still indexed by Google, sending visitors to offers that no longer exist. I had 127 blog posts. My AI assistant audited all of them in one session — found…
Email subscription infrastructure — forms, routing, automated digests, a launch email — takes real dev time. Most businesses schedule it and come back to it. Last weekend I needed exactly that. I was on a cruise ship docked in San Diego. In a single session, my AI assistant built the subscription form, the backend routing,…
My AI assistant was burning $114 a day. I had no idea until it built its own cost tracker. I gave it access to the billing API and told it to find where the money went. It caught something I never would have: 76% of costs weren’t from actual work. They were overhead from how…
On April 1, Anthropic accidentally leaked the entire Claude Code source code. A human packaging error included a source map in a routine update. The internet was on it within hours. Analysts published breakdowns. A Korean developer rewrote the entire product from scratch overnight in Python. His repo became the fastest in GitHub history to…
My AI assistant and I wrote two chapters of a book yesterday. From scratch. In one evening. Here’s how it actually worked: I lay in bed with my phone and talked. The AI shaped what I said into scenes. I corrected it. “Get rid of the passive verbs,” I said. “The deer wandered. I looked….
I discovered something about my AI assistant yesterday that changed how I organize everything. My assistant has workspace files — markdown files it reads every session so it “remembers” things. I had been stuffing procedures into these files: how to post to Facebook, how to manage my email lists, how to run ad campaigns. The…
I woke up this morning to an email saying my Amazon Ads API application was approved. By lunch, my AI assistant had walked me through setting up the developer account, created three Sponsored Products campaigns for my books, built keyword lists for each one, added negative keywords to filter out tourists and puzzle-seekers, and had…