Notes on getting work done by agents
Comparisons, prices as of this month, and what actually works when you hand a task to an AI agent. Written by the people who build and test them.
AI Agent Platforms with No Vendor Lock-in (2026)
"No vendor lock-in" is one of the most overused phrases on enterprise pricing pages. Every platform has some lock-in. The honest question is which lock-ins you can live with and which would be catastrophic if you had…
AI Agent Platforms with the Best Integrations (2026)
The "most integrations" claim is the cheapest one a SaaS marketing page can make. Counting connectors does not tell you whether the platform can do real agent work inside each one. A platform with five hundred…
AI Agent for Square Receipt Categorisation
A coffee shop processes between four hundred and two thousand Square transactions a day. A barber shop processes between thirty and eighty. A food truck does about one hundred and fifty. None of those operators want…
AI Agent for Shopify Inventory Restock
A Shopify store with five hundred SKUs is impossible to manage inventory for by hand. Every Monday morning the operations person scrolls through the inventory tab, identifies SKUs running low, looks up the supplier,…
AI Agent for PayPal Dispute Monitoring
PayPal disputes have a response window. For Item Not Received and Significantly Not As Described disputes the merchant has ten calendar days to respond. For chargebacks routed through PayPal the window is shorter.…
AI Agent for Mixpanel Funnel Anomaly Alerts
A growth team watches three funnels. Onboarding, activation, payment. Each funnel has five to twelve steps. Mixpanel exposes those steps in the dashboard. The team checks the dashboard once a week, sometimes once a…
AI Agent for Microsoft Teams Message Summary
Every morning at a time you set, the agent calls the Microsoft Graph API and pulls the last twenty-four hours of messages from each whitelisted channel. For each message it asks one question: does the user need to…
AI Agent for Help Scout Conversation Tagging
Help Scout supports tags but does not enforce them. Over time a support inbox accumulates hundreds of tags, most of them near-synonyms applied by different agents in different weeks. Searching the tag cloud becomes…
AI Agent for Freshdesk Ticket Routing
A typical Freshdesk team has between four and twelve groups: Tier 1 Support, Billing, Technical, Sales, Account Management, Trust and Safety, and so on. New tickets land in a single inbox or in a per-channel inbox. A…
AI Agent for Confluence Stale Page Cleanup
Every Confluence instance over two years old has pages nobody reads. The mess slows down search, confuses new hires, and surfaces wrong information in AI overviews and internal search.
AI Agent for Coda Doc Rollup
Coda is the only working surface for some teams. Specs, OKRs, sprint plans, retros, customer notes, all of it lives in Coda docs. Over a week the team writes a lot, decides some things, and updates a few status…
AI Agents for YouTubers: What Actually Saves Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents to a YouTuber is not "scale your channel." It is "stop spending three days on the parts of upload that do not show up on camera." Most mid-sized YouTubers I talk to, the 10k to 1M…
AI Agents for Real Estate Brokers: What Saves Time in 2026
Broker-owners looking at AI, whether they run a single-office shop or a multi-office regional firm, tend to want the same thing. They are not trying to replace agents. They are trying to take hours of brokerage-level…
AI Agents for Property Managers: What Saves Time in 2026
Residential property management is a job composed almost entirely of five-to-fifteen-minute interruptions. A tenant's garbage disposal jams at 7pm. An owner emails asking why last month's repair cost $340. A lease…
AI Agents for Podcasters: What Actually Saves Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents to a podcaster is not "grow your show." It is "stop spending five hours editing the parts of an episode no one cares about." Almost every solo or small-team podcaster I have worked with…
AI Agents for Nutritionists: What Actually Saves Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents to a nutritionist or dietitian is not "scale your practice." It is "stop spending half your week on food logs, intake forms, and insurance paperwork that the client never sees." Most…
AI Agents for Healthcare Admins: What Saves Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents inside a medical practice is not "AI doctor." It is "stop spending the front-desk's Tuesday afternoon on hold with United, calling about a prior auth that has been sitting in their…
AI Agents for Fitness Coaches: What Actually Saves Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents to a fitness coach is not "10x your client roster." It is "stop dropping the Sunday-night check-in pile." Most online and hybrid coaches I talk to do not have a programming problem.…
AI Agents for Financial Advisors: Where They Save Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents to a financial advisor is not "robo-advisor 2.0." It is "stop spending Sunday night writing the briefing notes for Monday's six client meetings." Most solo and small-team RIAs I talk to…
AI Agents for Course Creators: What Saves Time in 2026
The honest pitch for AI agents to a course creator is not "scale your course." It is "stop being the bottleneck on tier-1 student support during launch week." Often the bottleneck is not curriculum. It is answering…
AI Agents for Bookkeepers: What Actually Saves Time in 2026
Bookkeeping runs on the same five tasks in a loop: categorise transactions, reconcile bank feeds, chase invoices, schedule bill payments, and prep the month-end close. Every one of those tasks is what an AI agent was…
AI Agent Update Cycles: Safe Change Management for Production Agents
Production AI agents need updates. Models improve. Prompts get tighter. Tools get added. The team finds a way to make the stopping rule clearer. The question is not "should we update" but "how do we update without…
AI Agent State Management: Memory, Checkpoints, and Durability
The single hardest non-model problem in agent engineering is state. The model is stateless. Every other part of the system that gives it the illusion of continuity, of memory, of resumption, is your code. Get it…
AI Agent Prompt Versioning: Storage, Promotion, Rollback
Code without version control is a hobby. Prompts without version control are a liability. The reason most agent prompts produce silent regressions in week six is not that the prompt got worse; it is that nobody can…
AI Agent Prompt Engineering: 5 Parts of a Production Prompt
Prompt engineering for AI agents is not the same craft as prompt engineering for chatbots. A chatbot prompt shapes one response. An agent prompt shapes a loop: the model picks a tool, reads the result, decides…
Multi-Agent Coordination Patterns: Supervisor, Peer, Market, Shared-State
The intuition that "more agents will do better than one agent" is wrong more often than it is right. Most production multi-agent systems exist because the work has genuine boundaries (different access controls,…
AI Agent Integration Patterns: Webhook, OAuth, MCP, Polling, Queue
Most AI agent failures in production are not model failures. They are integration failures. A webhook arrives twice and the agent acts twice. An OAuth refresh fails silently and the agent runs unauthenticated. A…
AI Agent Data Residency: EU, India, US Architecture Patterns
Data residency is one of the silent gating items for enterprise sales of AI agents. The product can be perfect, but if the prompts leave the EU, the deal dies. This guide is the architecture playbook for…
AI Agent Audit Trails: What to Log, Keep and Protect in 2026
An AI agent audit trail is a time-ordered, tamper-evident record of what an agent did on each run: what happened, when and where, from what source, with what outcome and under whose identity, plus each tool call and…
AI Agents for SaaS Founders: Where They Actually Earn Their Keep
The honest pitch for AI agents to a SaaS founder is not "scale your team." It is "stop dropping the recurring five-to-fifteen-minute tasks that compound into churn." Most SaaS founders I talk to do not have a…