I don’t have any employees. I have agents I call employees, and they mess things up all the time. That goes for my job application employee and my newsletter employee. So I set up Discord notifications to tell me every time something stops working, and I build in points where they have to stop. I tell them, “once you see this, then you have to stop and wait for me.”
If I vanished tomorrow, pretty much nobody could take over unless they were using my computer, because everything runs off my subscription. Those Discord messages would keep coming, and every one of those stops would still be waiting for me.
THE NUMBER
Maor Shlomo built his company, Base44, without staff, so in the early months nobody else could watch the servers overnight. He set an alarm every two to three hours to check on them. The night a traffic spike took the platform down, he caught it within 10 minutes. Without those alarms, Fortune reported, he wouldn’t have caught it for six hours.
2 THINGS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW
An engineer quit Baidu and left an AI version of himself to do his job
Before he quit Baidu this spring, an algorithm engineer spent a week building an AI version of himself. His coworkers helped, feeding an internal AI system his code, documents, research and chat histories. The build went fast because years of his work were already written down. By the end of that week, he said, the bot could replace “90% of his work.” After he left, his coworkers could still message the bot with technical questions and give it tasks. “The only thing you can’t do is video call it,” he told Sixth Tone. “It’s like leaving a tombstone,” he said of handing it over. “You want it to look good when future colleagues see it.”
A contractor counted who books the most calls
At Jolly Heating Air Plumbing and Electric, an outside answering service booked 25-40% of after-hours calls, an AI books 60-70%, and Jolly’s own people book 85-90% when they pick up, Contracting Business reported.
THE DEEP DIVE
Mollie Mueller’s agents made sales on her maternity leave. The alerts went to Promotions.
At the end of May, nine months pregnant, Mollie Amkraut Mueller set up AI agents to keep her one-person business in Seattle running while she had her baby. She teaches and consults on AI for a living. No company was paying her during leave.
Her agents drafted the weekly newsletter and LinkedIn posts, answered visitors’ questions, tried to bring buyers to her products and sent her research updates.
Newsletters went out while she was offline. Two people she’d never met bought a small guide, and she didn’t notice the sales for two days because the notifications went to her Promotions tab. “It wasn’t a lot of money,” she wrote on her blog. But someone had bought something from her business “while I was on the couch with a newborn.”
The part that waited on her stalled. The agents planned a push for her AI Business Playbook and then needed a few approvals, just as she started wondering whether she wanted to keep selling it. “I couldn’t quite bring myself to approve a campaign for a direction I might leave behind,” she wrote. “That’s a management problem, and I was the manager.”
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Week 4 of 4: The two-week test
I’d fail this one. You might not. Everything you’ve set up has a day it needs you: an approval, a login, a payment or a decision only you can give. This week you’ll write one page for the person who’d cover for you, then see if they can run things from it. You won’t actually leave. You’ll go through the two weeks on paper. Block an hour for the first three steps.
Text the one person who’d cover for you if you were gone. That might be a staffer, a partner or a friend. Say: “Nothing’s wrong. Can I have ten minutes this week? I’m testing whether my business could keep running without me, and you’re who I’d want to ask.”
List what runs without you, like invoices, reminders, reports or posts. Go through the next 14 days and mark the first day one of them needs you. If nothing runs without you yet, pick the one job in your business that stops when you do and go to step 3.
Write one page about the thing that stops first. Say what it does and how to tell if it’s working today. Say where its alerts go (mine go to Discord, Mollie’s landed in Promotions), how to pause it and where the logins are kept, never the passwords themselves. Then write down the decisions it waits on you for, what you’d choose for each, and who to call if that doesn’t cover it. If it’s a job you do by hand, skip the alerts and the pausing, and write how you do it instead.
Hand that person the page and explain nothing. Then ask three questions. Is it working today? How would you pause it? (Skip that one for a job done by hand.) Say it stopped today and I can’t be reached: what do you do? Every answer they can’t find on the page becomes a new line on it.
Fix the first thing that stops. For a login or a payment, give them their own access or write down who can log in or pay. For a decision, the page already says what you’d choose. For an approval or an alert, add the person covering for you in whatever tool sends it. Then set a phone reminder for three months from now to do this again, because your tools will have changed by then.
If you use Claude Code, it can do steps 2 and 3 for you. Open Terminal on a Mac or PowerShell on Windows, type claude, press enter and paste this: “Here’s everything that runs on its own for me: [list them]. Ask me about each one, a question at a time, until you know what it needs from me and how often. If any of them were set up on this computer, look at them yourself. Then pretend I leave tomorrow for two weeks and can’t be reached. Walk through day 1 to day 14 and tell me the first day each one stops without me, and why. For the one that stops first, write a one-page handover for [name] in plain English and save it on my Desktop. Leave passwords out of it.”
If you built last issue’s watcher, the check that writes to you every Monday, have it write to the person covering for you too.
Stuck? Reply to this email. I’ll help.
WHAT’S COMING
That’s the end of this four-week series. The next one starts at an economic summit in Pasadena, where speakers said AI is bringing the biggest boom of self-started small businesses. I was in the room, I’m one of those businesses, and there was a question about that boom nobody got to ask.
Written by Manu (Mo), with help from the AI tools I discuss.