The Automated Operator

In which I document my attempts to use AI to fully replace myself in running my business

By Alex Willen

· Launched 9 months ago

15 Ways I'm Using AI to Manage my Small Business

And some thoughts on the things it can't quite handle yet.

Apr 16•Alex Willen

Creating a Dashboard with Claude Design

Apr 23•Alex Willen

Opus 4.5 Codes, Gemini 3 Writes the Copy, Nano Banana Pro Generates Images, and I Sit Here Slack Jawed

Jan 15•Alex Willen

Shortcut.ai is a Great Excel Agent (and Some Thoughts on AI Replacing Professional Services)

Feb 12•Alex Willen

Using Cloudflare's Agentic Interface to (Mostly) Seamlessly Launch a Website

A small task, but a nice peek into how things may look when our agents are taking care of tedious tasks in the background.

Jun 11•Alex Willen

Using My AI Assistant to Automate Amazon Return Reimbursements

Amazon uses unnecessary processes as a barrier against giving you money you're entitled to. Luckily, AI is very good at unnecessary processes!

Jun 4•Alex Willen

Updating Financial Ledgers with Claude Code

More tedious administrata automated away with AI.

May 28•Alex Willen

The Claude -pocaylpse or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scheduled Tasks

What do you mean my projects can't use millions of Opus tokens via a headless Claude Code session and not pay for them?!

May 21•Alex Willen

Building a Cashflow Projection Dashboard

I wanted the answer to one simple question, but when you've got AI you might as well just build a whole dashboard...

May 14•Alex Willen

Mining WhatsApp, WeChat, Alibaba and Gmail to Create a Unified Supplier Dashboard

Creating dashboards is fun and easy with AI. Interacting with uncooperative chat software, not as much.

May 7•Alex Willen

Four Ways ChatGPT Images 2.0 Can Actually Be Useful For Your Business

You and I both know you don't really need to generate that many photorealistic images of your D&D campaign...

Apr 30•Alex Willen