AI-HOY, AInauts!

Welcome to a fresh issue of your favorite newsletter!

One developer rebuilds the Adobe suite, Photoshop and all. An agent sits your certification exam. And ChatGPT turns ten open tabs into a finished presentation without you even having to watch.

Spoiler: you can do this too. Today, we've brought you 345 jobs you can hand over to your agent. And if you're missing a tool, you can build it yourself.

Here's what's in this issue:

Let's get into it!

B2B customer issues rarely resolve in a single interaction. They move across teams, systems, and account history that most AI tools were never designed to track.

A new briefing paper from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Front, looks at why AI built for high-volume consumer support creates new coordination gaps when it meets the multi-team reality of B2B service, and what leaders should ask before investing in their next AI tool.

Get the free briefing paper to see the three questions that separate tools built for your environment from tools that will create more work.

Get the Report

A year ago, you asked a chatbot a question. Today, you give your personal agent a job. And it keeps working while your laptop is closed.

Keeping track has become a job in itself. This map shows how crowded the agent market has become:

We use the agents and scheduled tasks in ChatGPT Work and Claude Code, especially the new Claude Code Projects, to automate recurring workflows.

But those basic features aren't all that proactive yet. New personal agents such as Instinct, Meta Muse, ChatGPT Dots and Grok Bot are further along.

Zoom out, and the direction is clear: we're clicking through individual apps and websites less often. Plugins, connectors, computer use and agents handle that in the background. Everything comes together in a single window: your personal agent.

Three shifts have stood out to us in recent weeks:

The wave of personal agents will reach Europe sooner rather than later. And because people keep asking us, "What can I actually do with one?", we've built an answer.

Language note: the use-case directory and its prompts are in German.

At usecases.ainauten.com, you'll find 345+ practical use cases with prerequisites, steps, sources and prompts. One of our agents maintains the collection, continually finding, checking and adding new cases. Of course.

Your own agent can use it too: here's the prompt for connecting the collection to your setup in a few clicks.

Which agent is best changes by the week. The question that lasts is which task you want off your plate. Pick a relevant one from the directory and try it this week.

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"Get AI certifications without doing anything!" That's how AI Certified Free pitches itself. The site collects free courses from major providers and supplies instructions for completing them: ChatGPT clicks through the lessons in your browser and solves the final tests.

While you grab a coffee, the agent grabs the badge.

We tested it. The result: 62 more certificates.

Cheating? A little, yes. The supplied instruction explicitly tells the agent to continue even where the provider prohibits AI help on exams.

A clever hack? Also yes. Getting it to work means you've understood something: how to set up an agent, give it a clear task and steer it to the finish.

Testing what you know used to be the measure. Today, getting a machine to finish a task properly matters much more. The same setup can handle invoice filing, lead research or your weekly report. The certificate is the least important part.

That's the shortcut AI makes possible. But it only works if you know the terrain.

An AI subscription is a bit like a gym membership: you have access, but it's the routine that gets you fit.

Language note: the following survey and presentation are in German. A recent Bitkom survey shows the gap between having AI and using it well: 57% of companies in Germany already use AI. But only 3% of users say they make substantial use of its potential.

Real practical skills will matter more than certificates. A badge you never earned yourself is a facade that quickly cracks.

Course providers have a problem: a test an agent solves on the side isn't much use. And employers should stop asking about badges and ask people to show what they can actually get done with AI.

Our advice: forget the badges. Pick a task that annoys you every week and teach your agent to handle it. That's the kind of practical work we cover here in the newsletter.

Let's move straight to a practical example. You're researching a pitch, a workshop or your next meeting. Ten tabs are open, but none of it is on a slide yet.

Good news: that step is getting much faster and easier. Two updates this week fit together.

The ChatGPT extension for Chrome now reads and compares your open tabs. It can also operate your browser, fill out forms and click through pages.

You don't even need the desktop app; ChatGPT in the browser is enough. It works on every plan and in most Chromium browsers, including Chrome, Comet, Edge, Brave and Opera.

And with the new ChatGPT Slides, ChatGPT turns a conversation, files or an outline into a presentation you can edit, present or export to PowerPoint, PDF and Google Slides.

Slides is initially rolling out to Pro, Business and Enterprise accounts with Space. The browser extension is available to everyone.

Claude's Slides already got us to cancel Gamma. Naturally, we had to try ChatGPT Slides too.

Visual note: the ChatGPT interface, slide text and demo website in the screenshots below are in German. The workflow is the same.

First Claude, now ChatGPT: decks are being made right where the research already lives. That already cost us our Gamma subscription, and ChatGPT Slides is pushing in exactly the same direction.

It gets tough for Gamma, Canva and others when a quick meeting deck comes included in the chat. Specialist tools earn their place when design really matters.

PhotoCraft recently appeared on GitHub: a Photoshop clone, for free. Alongside it came counterparts to Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom and more. Seven programs, all open source.

One developer built them by having Claude coordinate eight AI agents in parallel. The post about it went viral.

No, they aren't finished. The developer calls them early alpha, and RAW support and AI features are still largely missing. But PhotoCraft already opens Photoshop files with layers and masks and has nearly 10,000 stars on GitHub.

Work that once took a team and years can now be started by one person.

Code-focused models make this possible. And with tools such as Reverse Engineer Anything, your coding agent can inspect how a feature works in a finished app instead of guessing. Its open-source code is booming, with more than 300,000 GitHub stars.

Here's an entertaining detour. Matt puts it neatly: "It's about what this unlocks in our minds, the new building blocks we have, and the big question: WHAT WILL YOU BUILD?!"

Professionals are doing it too. In a survey of more than 800 developers, 35% had replaced at least one purchased tool with something they'd built themselves, mainly automations, admin tools and dashboards.

We're seeing the same thing in the AInauten community. A few examples from recent days:

Worth repeating: these aren't big developer projects. They're annoying everyday workflows someone decided to solve themselves.

We showed this ourselves two weeks ago. Instead of continuing to pay for a dictation subscription, we built AInauten Voice. Alongside lip-reading in English, it now even understands Swiss German.

But it can be smaller than that: just the tool you wish existed.

We missed the 360-degree panoramas that used to be in Google's camera app. When Google announced last week that apps built in AI Studio could be installed privately on your own phone, we tried it straight away.

Honestly, it wasn't as smooth as Google's website made it look.

So we downloaded Google's source code. Codex finished building the app with a stronger model and installed it directly on the phone connected by USB.

Our little app now takes the photos and stitches them into a sphere, and Google Photos displays the result as a panorama you can rotate.

For a long time, software gave you two options: buy off the shelf or pay for custom development. Add a fairly limited selection of open-source alternatives. That model is shaking, especially for vendors without a real differentiator.

Features can be copied. Your data, workflows and habits can't. Someone who's spent years tagging photos in Lightroom won't switch just because there's a free clone. Someone who only needs three features from an expensive subscription might.

Our rule of thumb: build it yourself when the tool serves only you or your team, you use a small part of an expensive subscription or you're missing one specific feature. Keep buying when lots of people collaborate in it, it holds sensitive data, or support, updates and security are business-critical.

Here's what we want you to take away: you too can build a tool in an afternoon that helps with your daily work, without a technical background.

That's it for today. See you in the next issue!

Reto & Fabian
Your AInauten