I am now on the MCP route, where I have lots of personally hosted MCPs. Including managing calender/e-mail.

It does not cost too much effort to maintain MCP servers. No port forwarding or VPNs required thanks to OpenAI tunnels.

And security wise its quite nice, since you have to activate MCP or give permission sometimes. So each chat is kind of isolated from each-other.

I actually went down a different path and set it up so my friend and I can use the same agent with approval-gated turns. He's more technical than I am, but I believe I'm better at marketing. We can see both of our prompts and be on the same page. There is also a mode where we can branch off with our own agents. Watching his prompts made me better at producing my own and using the agent effectively.

Very cool setup. I went down a similar path and while it is definitely cool to see the extent of how agentic AI can be, I agree the ROI isn't _quite_ there yet.

I don't live in a world where I need to be constantly reading and replying to emails, so 95% of my inbox is just subscription spam. With development I need to be at the helm to design the planning requirements and actively make decisions before the agent goes off and executes the plan. But I don't need a personal agent for that, I work directly out of codex/claude-code.

I've been building a triage agent for my inbox and whatsapp (it's product shaped), which has ironically left me not building one of these. So even while productizing, I'm getting fomo on the full monty.

I've also been building a harness that maintains my apps which I'm hoping to open source.

Hard agree that these things don't have personal ROI, and are actually quite hard to build reliably.

But it's really fun! And having a bot fix a live error is pretty exciting.

tried similar setups in the past, but messages is just not my jam, so built a html wrapper on top of claude code and open code that runs on a small-ish instance. looks like this https://i.imgur.com/lj9Fgco.png (screenshot anonymized with chatgpt) and allows multiple conversation per project, and has a few conveniences like scheduled tasks. one of the project in the list is the project itself, so I can add features whenever.

Have you thought about browser/machine use at all? I like the idea of Grok Bot but would rather host/maintain it myself with my own agents.

Not pointed at the author, but at the current state of affairs: this is fucking exhausting. We went and made a trillions-dollar market out of the bikeshedding maximization machine.

The most interesting part of this to me is having an agent that reads logs and spins up fixes in real time.

Great write up!

Have you experimented with using a single executive agent (instead of multiple agents)?

ty for the writeup!

being able to talk to each of the agents via dm (but also in group chats) sounds interesting

does that mean that you have 1 chat per domain specific agent? can you also start multiple sessions/threads or is that not part of the way you interact with them currently?

Cool! How much does this setup cost you, roughly?

Appreciate the honesty and lack of hype.

It's always fun seeing how other people are using these tools.

> Has it been worth it? For the journey, yes, for the ROI, nope.

It's also nice seeing someone experiment without succumbing to AI psychosis.

What is the total monthly spend, approximately, on all this; if you don't mind saying, of course?

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I would never have the power to have AI just do everything. I like to create, not have some slop machine do whatever.