Big companies are handing out free agents to employees now

2026-10-22 05:28

Big companies are handing out free agents to employees now. Handing one out is not the same as getting someone to use it. Microsoft says Volkswagen has 330,000+ employees kitted out with Copilot. Just over 26,000 agents were active last month. That's 7.9%. The good news is general agents are becoming normal. The bad news is people aren't picking them up. Feels a lot like the industrial revolution right now, when hand production turned into machine automation. And every time productivity jumps, the tech turns out to be the easy part. What's hard is people's dependence on how they already work.

No app. No signup. No interface

. the hottest cloud agent in Silicon Valley. Instinct is the most talked-about personal agent in the Valley this year, and its only front door is your contacts list. Save a number, text it or call it over iMessage or WhatsApp. You reach Instinct the same way you reach everyone else. Behind it sits a cloud machine that never sleeps, with a browser and your logins already in it. You can't get its specs or which model it runs by asking in chat. Instinct also reaches out first. It'll text or call you on its own, and sometimes it hands you the finished work instead of an answer. Invite-only for now, and free. 🔗 https://app.instinct.com/invite?t=crvjcnr5zfr7z2n3cru4u3ocdu

2026-10-23

grok-bot's Tailscale plugin is out.

The CLI version I'd been running kept dropping offline, so I had a watchdog script babysitting it. Plugin Tailscale is a lot more stable. Rollout looks gradual, though. My account only got it today.

2026-10-22

I stuffed an agent into an Android phone.

You've probably run into those short videos lately where an agent drives a phone around by itself. This one is called Mika, and it's a free open-source project. It's an Android app that works in the background through accessibility mode, so it can use pretty much any other app you have installed. Reply to someone on WeChat, scroll Xiaohongshu, drop something in a cart and check out. It finds the buttons by looking at the screen. There's no API to wire up, and it doesn't care what resolution your phone is. When it reaches a payment step or a captcha it stops and lets you finish. 🔗 github.com/wangzan101/Mika

2026-11-01

My product went profitable, and something in me broke.

Someone on Xiaohongshu posted a while back that she sells phone keyboard skins she made with Codex. Eight, ten yuan a pack. Over a thousand a month. I've been at mine for months. October: a few hundred copies, $1,200 gross. Platform fee 30%, tax 10%, so 60% should have landed. It came to just over a thousand dollars. I still don't know how the math pulled that off. I have an overseas bank account. Once lost $500 to a wire transfer off one. I'd still tell you to take payout through WorldFirst: less hassle, lower fees. You can also get a Hong Kong USD credit card tied to it that spends your WorldFirst balance directly. Digital card is free. Physical is $4. Mainland purchases under ¥200 skip the processing fee, and right now there's 1% cashback.

2026-11-01