My Employees Are AI Agents. I Manage Them From a Cafe in Bali.

I’ve been working daily with AI the last few years, but in the last couple months my work has fundamentally changed. Work for me now is sitting in cafes in the Bali sunshine while multiple AI agents work through tasks on their own, simultaneously, across my businesses. Not chatbots waiting for me to type something. Actual autonomous agents out in the world, logging into accounts, writing code, reviewing documents, solving problems. All at the same time. It’s like having a room full of super genius employees sitting around a table and my job is just to walk around, look over each one’s shoulder, give advice and feedback and next steps, and move on to the next one. Then sit down and go back to writing this piece.

Right now, I have one agent working on updates to an app I built. I have another running an automation where it goes into each one of my accounts and grabs statements for bookkeeping, part of a broader system I’ve created that looks like it will totally replace my bookkeeper soon. I have an agent writing templates for communication with customers for a foraging experience business I run here in Bali. I have another doing a deep code review of a WhatsApp event app I’m working on. And I have one figuring out why my Facebook business account isn’t working. The kind of thing that used to eat an entire afternoon and make me crazy. It’s just being done now, totally on its own, while I write this.

None of these agents are waiting for me to tell them what to do next. They’re not paused on a screen somewhere. They’re running. When one finishes a task, it moves on to the next step or comes back with questions. When one hits a wall, it tries a different approach. I check in on each of them the way you’d check in on a colleague, not the way you’d use a tool. The difference sounds subtle but it changes everything about how work feels.

When I want to step back and get a more high level view on all of my work, I talk to Alex, an agent I’ve set up in Slack. He has access to an index we created of every file on my computer, five Google drives, all of my various email accounts, my calendar, and an ongoing work project document. He understands where each of my projects is currently and can help me think through what’s most important to do right now. I can ask him something like “what’s falling behind this week?” and he’ll pull from everything, across every project, and give me a real answer. Not a guess. An answer based on the actual state of my work.

And then there’s the personal side, which is the part that surprises people most.

If I want to talk about my health, or any personal issues I’m trying to work through, I have a personal agent that knows the exercises I’m doing, the supplements I’m taking. He knows how the heat in Bali has been affecting my skin. He knows what works for me, what doesn’t work for me. He has access to a knowledge base of years of tests and trials and errors on my health.

He knows the relationships I’ve been in over the past year and what I’ve learned from them. When I want to talk about something in my relationship life, he has all the context of everything I’ve thought about relationships before. So instead of repeating the same mistakes, or maybe in a more positive way, instead of forgetting about the learnings I’ve had, each new experience builds upon the last.

This is the part that’s hard to explain to people. It’s not therapy. It’s not journaling. It’s more like having a memory that’s better than your own. One that doesn’t forget the thing you figured out six months ago about why a certain pattern keeps showing up in your life. One that can say, “You’ve been here before. Last time you learned this.” And then you can actually build on it instead of starting over. It’s made me a kinder, more consistent, healthier, more understanding person with stronger relationships than I had before.

I feel like I’ve walked through a door into a completely different reality than most people I talk to. Most people have tried to use AI to edit an email, felt like it didn’t do a good job, and stopped using it. That’s not what this is.

I think about all the years I spent doing everything myself. The late nights doing bookkeeping. The hours formatting a website when I should have been thinking about what the business actually needed. The work that had to get done and there was nobody else to do it. I ran an incubator kitchen in San Francisco for years. I ran underground markets, organized mushroom foraging classes and cheffed pop-up dinners on houseboats. Every one of those businesses I needed more of a team. I was the bookkeeper, web designer, customer service department, marketing director, person fixing the broken payment system at midnight. Not because I wanted to do all of those things, but because there was nobody else.

All of that is just gone now. Not because I’ve hired some huge team or raised money or figured out some productivity system. It’s gone because I can sit in a cafe with a coffee and describe what I need and watch it happen.

I keep thinking about what this means for people like me. People who have ideas and energy but not resources. People who’ve been running businesses on pure stubbornness and late nights. For twenty years, the gap between having a vision and being able to execute it was filled with money, connections, employees, investors. You needed all of that infrastructure just to get something off the ground. The idea was maybe ten percent of it. The other ninety percent was logistics, labor, and capital.

That ratio is flipping. Fast. The work skill of the future isn’t office politics. It’s not knowing how to manage people. It’s not being good at networking events. It’s having a clear-eyed vision and knowing how to explain it. That’s it. If you can think clearly about what you want and communicate it well, you can build almost anything right now. The bottleneck isn’t resources or connections or money. The bottleneck is clarity.

When I work now I can feel my brain expanding. I can feel my capability and capacity for managing multiple ongoing projects at the same time growing as I work with these agents. At first it feels totally overwhelming, having these multiple processes running at the same time, needing to keep them all in my mind. But as I work with them more, I can feel my brain starting to hold three, four, five, six different autonomous simultaneous ongoing processes at once. Like a muscle I didn’t know I had.

It reminds me of something I noticed years ago when I started running underground dinners in San Francisco. The first time I cooked for forty people in a stranger’s apartment, my brain couldn’t hold it all. The timing, the plating, the conversations, the dishes piling up. But after ten of them, twenty of them, I could hold the whole evening in my head at once. I could feel when the room needed something before anyone asked. That’s what’s happening now with agents. My brain is learning to hold a new kind of complexity. Not the complexity of one task done well, but the complexity of many autonomous processes running in parallel.

It’s confusing and amazing at the same time. The world is fundamentally changing at this moment and I’m living right in the middle of it. I’ve run businesses for 20 years. Nothing has ever felt like this.