It’s Tuesday noon and some guy named Dominic wants to teach me how to build “autonomous assistants” that “really work for me.”
I’m sitting here with a beer going warm, looking at this LinkedIn post, wondering when exactly we all agreed to stop being honest with each other.
“Without you having to constantly intervene,” he writes.
I once had a woman tell me the same thing about our relationship. Lasted three months. She intervened plenty.
The guy’s founded three companies. One sells scents that are supposed to optimize your brain. I don’t know what that means. Nobody knows what that means. But it sounds good if you don’t think about it, and most people don’t think about it, so there you go.
Another company he sold to some education group. Now he sells webinars.
That’s not a career. That’s a guy running from one con to the next, staying one step ahead of the moment when people figure out there’s nothing behind the curtain.
But I respect the hustle. I do. It takes a certain kind of balls to stand in front of people and promise them autonomy in sixty minutes.
I can’t even find my car keys in sixty minutes.
“No slides, just application,” he promises.
As if the absence of slides means something. As if truth is defined by what it isn’t.
I’ve met guys like this in bars. They always tell you what they don’t do. They don’t eat gluten. They don’t watch TV. They don’t do slides.
Nobody ever asks them what they actually do. Because if you ask, you’ll find out it’s nothing. It’s nothing all the way down.
Last week I built a multi-agent system. Real one. With state management and tool calls and all that shit that sounds like nothing until you’ve spent two days debugging why your agent called the same API three times in a row because you didn’t handle an edge case.
That’s autonomy, friend. A system that makes its own mistakes without asking your permission.
You can’t sell that in a webinar. You can’t wrap that up in sixty minutes between someone’s lunch meeting and their afternoon call about Q4 projections.
Learning hurts. Real learning. The kind where you sit there at 2 AM and the code doesn’t work and you hate yourself and you hate the machine and you open another beer because what else are you going to do.
Dominic’s not selling that. He’s selling the fantasy that you can skip the pain. That there’s a shortcut. That you can build a “team” of AI assistants in an hour and then go back to your life like nothing happened.
“This is our last AI webinar of the year.”
The artificial scarcity. Oldest trick in the book.
My old man sold vacuum cleaners door to door. Every day was the last day of the sale. Thirty years of last days. He died with three vacuums in his garage and a liver like a brick.
At least he admitted it when he was drunk. At least he knew what he was.
Here’s the thing about n8n, the tool they’re using. It’s fine. It’s actually pretty good. You can connect APIs, set up triggers, make things happen automatically. You feel like a hacker for a few hours. You feel like you’ve figured something out.
But calling that “autonomous assistants” is like calling a row of dominoes a “self-organizing system.” Sure, they fall over by themselves. But you set them up. You pushed the first one. And when one falls wrong, they all fall wrong, and you’re standing there wondering why your “autonomous” assistant stopped working when the API hit its rate limit.
That’s not autonomy. That’s a Rube Goldberg machine with better marketing.
I won’t be attending the webinar.
Not because I think I’m better. I’m not better. I’m sitting here with a warm beer at noon on a Tuesday, writing about a guy I’ve never met, and that’s not exactly a position of moral superiority.
But I know what I know. I know that anything worth understanding takes time. That anyone who tells you different is selling something. That the only honest promise is the promise of confusion and frustration and slow, painful progress.
And I know my beer is warm, and that’s a problem I can actually solve.
Dominic will do his webinar. People will attend. They’ll feel good for a few hours. They’ll build their three “autonomous” agents and post about it on LinkedIn and feel like they’ve joined some kind of club.
And then, sometime in January, they’ll wonder why the thing stopped working. Why the “team” isn’t communicating anymore. Why autonomy isn’t what they thought it was.
And they’ll look for another webinar. Another guy with a promise. Another sixty minutes that will change everything.
The hustle never stops. It just changes names.
Next week: Why your Custom GPT isn’t a “colleague,” no matter what you call it.