Open LinkedIn for thirty seconds and somebody will sell you an “agent.” It answers your email, updates your customer list, books your meetings, and for all I know walks the dog. Ask the person selling it what an agent actually is and watch the sentence fall apart.
Here is the scandal nobody in the AI business wants printed: the word has been doing the work the product could not.
I’m Damon Nelson. I have built marketing automation for more than twenty years, which means I have watched plenty of words get sold before the thing behind them existed. “Agent” was about to join the list. Then a newsletter with a blunt title said the quiet part out loud, and I ended up with twenty-five of the things running parts of my business.
The receipts: a word with no definition and a price tag anyway
Ruben Hassid writes a newsletter called How to AI that reaches more than 800,000 readers. In August he published a piece titled “I hate agents”, and his complaint was mine. Everyone sells agents. Nobody defines them. He had refused to use the word for years for exactly that reason.
Then he gave the one definition that holds up. A chatbot answers your question. An agent goes and does the job, start to finish, without you sitting there typing the next step. That is the whole difference, and it is the difference the sales pitches skip.
His other receipt is the uncomfortable one. By his math, agents get about three times cheaper every year, and they are already cheaper than a lot of the people doing the same tasks. The direction is not up for debate.
And here is the contrarian part he and I agree on. Most businesses should not be building agents yet. His consulting firm trains employees to use AI before it builds them a single agent, because an agent on top of a team that does not understand the tool just makes mistakes faster.
You were not behind. The word was broken.
If you have nodded along in meetings about agents while quietly wondering what everyone was talking about, you were not the slow one in the room. There was nothing to understand. A product category with no definition is not a category. It is a marketing budget.
Everyone was selling agents and nobody could say what one was. The confusion was built in. It was never yours.
The agents you already had and used like a chatbot
The coding tools. Ruben points out that tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork technically are agents. They run tasks, spin up helpers, and report back. Most people, him included, still use them like a chatbot. Ask, answer, ask again.
The automation platforms. I have built on these for two decades. They finish a job, but you wire every step by hand, and one changed step breaks the chain. That is a machine, not a teammate.
The do-it-yourself bots. Ruben’s verdict on those was the same as mine: clunky to build and worse to maintain.
Then a newsletter showed its screen
What changed Ruben’s mind, and then mine, is a tool from xAI called Grok Bot. He is careful to say nobody paid him to write about it. There is no affiliate link in this post either.
The screen he shared is the clearest picture of an agent I have seen. On the left, a list of his bots. In the middle, each bot reports back when it finishes a job, and you can interrupt it any time to redirect it. On the right, the part that matters: the bot has its own computer and a routine that says how often it runs.
That is the definition made visible. It does not wait for you to type. It has a schedule, a workspace, and a job.
It plugs into your other apps the way a new hire gets logins. Ruben counted more than 200 connections, and his favorites are Gmail and Apify, a tool that pulls data off websites. In August you needed a Cursor Ultra or Teams plan or a Grok Heavy account to get in. That has since changed.
The exact prompts, straight from the source
Ruben built his first bot in front of his readers: a daily digest of the AI news he actually cares about. You click the plus sign, answer a few questions, and state the goal in plain words. His exact prompt:
Daily digest of AI news in my industry (or very close to it).
The bot asks follow-up questions, like how often it should run. Then you spell out what you want. His second prompt, word for word:
What I care about, as a daily digest:
- the top 3 news of AI by joint virality (The Rundown, Google News, what pops on Reddit, cross-check them)
- the top 3 news in the creator economy
- the top 3 news in the consulting business
- read ruben.substack.com and update me on a recent "how to" guide
Swap in your own industry and sources and that prompt works as written. After the first run he told it to send the digest to his Gmail instead, and it did. Ten minutes, two prompts, no code. His longer recipe for an advanced agent sits in the paid section of his newsletter, so it stays there.
The confession: what happened when I tried it
Now the October part. As of October 15, Grok Bot runs inside Grok itself on the paid plans. You no longer need the developer-flavored door Ruben had to use.
Two things changed how I work. You can create a bot on the fly, mid-conversation, and it saves. And you can save bots into groups. Building bots the old way meant starting from scratch for every new helper and wiring it into a team by hand. Now the team is a group. Drop a new bot in and it is part of the crew.
A few weeks ago I started with about nine bots. Today I have about twenty-five, working in teams: a marketing team, a research team, and a few groups that did not exist in my head until the first two were running. That is the pattern. You build the team you planned, and the teams show you what else they could be doing.
Plain disclaimer, in my own words: this is my experience, a few weeks in, on my paid account. Plans, prices and what is included change monthly, so check the current terms before you buy anything.
It is, by a wide margin, the easiest way I have found to run agents. Not the most powerful. The easiest, which for a one-person business is the number that matters.
Finish the investigation
Read Ruben’s piece, build the ten-minute news digest, and see if the word finally means something. If you want the next one of these in your inbox, join the Pit Crew. One email a week, no pitch parade.
This is the best one right now, but stay tuned. All the AI platforms will have something similar to this within the next 60 to 90 days.
