The five primitives I run a one-person company on
a day ago
- The author runs a one-person consumer product company using five primitives: browser-operating agent, coding agent, scheduled routines, persistent memory, and approval gates.
- The browser-operating agent drives real browser sessions with login credentials to handle the 90% of small-business operations that lack official APIs, such as seller dashboards and government portals.
- The coding agent reads repositories, writes changes, opens review passes, and deploys code, acting like a contractor with permanent probation; the human's role is to review diffs for containment.
- Scheduled routines run recurring jobs (e.g., scanning portals, drafting posts) to reduce mental open loops; they must explicitly report 'nothing changed' so silence indicates breakage.
- Persistent memory consists of structured notes per site, project, and decision, allowing agents to retain context and avoid re-explaining the business; notes should be split to improve retrieval.
- Approval gates require human approval before any irreversible action (e.g., sending money, filing applications, deploying to production), converting hours of doing into minutes of reviewing and making failures survivable.
- These primitives collectively cover two to four full-time roles' worth of routine work, cost a few hundred dollars per month, and fail regularly—but gates ensure failures are manageable.
- To start, one should pick the single most wasteful workflow, run it manually with an agent twice, write memory notes, place gates on money paths first, and schedule only after manual confirmation.
- The failure mode to avoid is scheduling first, which leads to confident garbage output if the workflow is incorrect.