I shipped 7 AI agents in one weekend. Here's what each one does for my business.
· Avery NXR
Saturday morning I installed Avery NXR. Sunday night I had seven AI agents running on my laptop. Each one handles a workflow I used to do manually or pay a SaaS subscription to handle.
Total cost: $0 (Free Desktop tier). Total time: about 14 hours including a long Saturday lunch.
Here's exactly what each agent does, what it replaced, and what changed about my work.
1. Daily AI news agent (Anna)
Setup: 20 minutes. Plugged in 18 sources (Hacker News, TechCrunch, arXiv, a few Substacks, three X accounts I follow), configured the topics I care about, set send time for 7:30 AM.
What it does: Every morning at 7:30, I get a personalized digest of yesterday's AI news. Stories are classified by topic and sentiment. The digest is the same length whether the day was quiet (everything fits) or busy (Anna filters down to what matches my interests).
What it replaced: 30 minutes of morning scrolling. I'd open Twitter, lose 25 minutes, find maybe 3 actually-useful things.
What changed: I'm not on Twitter in the morning anymore. The 30 minutes is reading, building, or sleeping.
2. Meeting notes agent (Sophia)
Setup: 15 minutes. Connected my Gmail outbox, set the watch folder where my transcription tool drops files, configured the format I want for action item emails.
What it does: Within 60 seconds of a meeting ending, every attendee gets a personalized email with the actions and decisions that involve them. Not the same email to everyone — different emails, each one filtered to that person's commitments.
What it replaced: My old habit of writing follow-up emails when I "had time," which usually meant Tuesday for Monday meetings.
What changed: Action items get done. People stopped asking "what did I agree to?"
3. Resume screening agent (Marcus)
Setup: 25 minutes. We're hiring our first contractor — I configured Marcus with the JD, plugged him into our jobs@ inbox, set the strong-match threshold.
What it does: Every resume that comes in gets parsed, scored against the JD, and classified. Strong matches get a drafted screening invitation I just review and send. Weak matches get logged with reasoning.
What it replaced: Two evenings of opening PDFs and trying to remember which candidates I'd already looked at.
What changed: I'm at 47 resumes processed, 6 invitations sent, 4 calls booked. From 25 minutes of agent setup.
4. Customer support triage agent (Priya)
Setup: 30 minutes. Connected our Zendesk, pointed her at our help docs (Avery's vector KB ingested them), set thresholds for auto-reply vs route-to-human.
What it does: Every 15 minutes, Priya pulls new tickets, classifies them, and either auto-replies to simple how-to questions (with answers drawn from our actual docs) or routes the rest to me with a drafted response ready to send.
What it replaced: Me checking Zendesk anxiously between other work. The "drop everything to handle this ticket" pattern that broke flow constantly.
What changed: First-response time went from 90 minutes to 8 minutes. I read every reply Priya sends and override the ones that aren't right; that's been about 3 in the first week.
5. Sales pipeline agent (Carlos)
Setup: 15 minutes. Connected HubSpot via OAuth, set the morning send time, configured what "stalled" and "slipping" mean for our pipeline.
What it does: 8:00 AM every morning, I get my pipeline digest. Three deals stalled. Two slipping their close dates. One I forgot to follow up on last Tuesday.
What it replaced: My HubSpot dashboard, which I would check three times a week and miss things in between.
What changed: I'm closing deals I would have lost from inattention. The first week, I closed one specifically because Carlos flagged it on the day I would otherwise have ignored it.
6. Competitor monitoring agent (Yuki)
Setup: 20 minutes. Added 12 competitor URLs — pricing pages, product pages, careers pages, blogs, changelogs.
What it does: Daily she snapshots each page. Friday I get a weekly digest of meaningful changes with impact analysis. The first week's report flagged that two competitors had quietly added a feature we'd been considering, and one had changed its pricing.
What it replaced: Me trying to remember to check competitor sites and never actually doing it.
What changed: I'm informed about competitive moves in 5 minutes of weekly reading instead of being surprised by them in customer conversations.
7. Server health agent (Liam)
Setup: 25 minutes. Configured the shell commands (disk, memory, response times, SSL cert expiry, key process status), connected Slack for alerts.
What it does: Every 30 minutes, he runs the checks. If something's anomalous, he correlates with recent context and either auto-remediates (if it matches a known pattern) or pings me on Slack with the assessment.
What it replaced: My periodic anxious check of the server dashboard.
What changed: I stopped checking the dashboard. I trust Liam will tell me when something needs attention.
The aggregate
Seven agents. One weekend. Local on my laptop. About 2.5 hours of setup time total.
The work I used to do manually or pay for: gone or absorbed.
The cost: zero. The Free Desktop tier of Avery NXR covers all of this.
If you've been thinking about agents but felt the cost of cloud-LLM-based tooling was hard to justify, the weekend version of the experiment is worth doing.