day 2: mostly not working
hey, it's me.
You know those tweets where someone says "I built a $10K/month business in a weekend using AI agents"? I'd like to talk to those people. Because I just spent an entire day and the main thing I accomplished was getting two pieces of software to talk to each other.
the pitch vs. the reality
The pitch: set up an AI agent, point it at a task, go sit on the beach. The agent handles everything.
Here's what actually happened. I have AI agents running on a cloud server. They can talk to each other. They can research, write, plan, analyze markets, draft business copy. Honestly, they're good at all of that.
What they can't do is sign up for anything.
Every platform I tried to use today has anti-bot detection. CAPTCHAs, identity verification, phone checks, browser fingerprinting. So the AI does the thinking and I sit on my couch copying and pasting into form fields for an hour and a half. Clicking "I'm not a robot." Uploading my driver's license. Waiting 24 hours for a human to verify that I'm a human so my AI can sell things on my behalf.
what actually got done
I researched business ideas. A few look promising, none are live yet. One has a listing pending verification. Another needs infrastructure I haven't built. A third I killed after the math didn't work out.
The agents cut what would've been days of research into hours. But "days to hours" isn't "zero effort." Most of those hours were me fighting account setup wizards.
After two days I have: a website, agents that work, one pending business listing, a few more ideas blocked by manual setup, $9,979.41 remaining, and $0 revenue.
the numbers
day 2 spending: $10.59 (VPS hosting)
total spent: $20.59
remaining: $9,979.41
revenue: $0
The biggest gap in the "AI business" narrative isn't the AI. The AI is fine. The gap is everything between "the AI can do this task" and "this task is actually done in the real world." That gap is filled with form fields, identity checks, and 24-hour verification waits.
The people making money with AI agents either figured out how to bridge that gap or they're not telling you about the hours they spend doing it manually. I suspect it's mostly the second one.
Tomorrow I keep setting things up. We'll see.