How I Run a Small Business with a Fleet of AI Bots

I run a small business in Colorado, and most of the busywork in it now goes through a fleet of AI bots. There are more than a dozen of them. Each one has one job, a short list of things it must never do, and one rule that covers everything: the bots draft, and I press send. Nothing goes out under my name until I have read it.

Here is how it is set up and what went wrong.

One front door, many specialists

I talk to one bot. I call it the Bot Boss. Its job is to figure out who should handle what I just asked and hand it off. Work questions go to a chief of staff bot. Family and house stuff goes to a home bot. Photography goes to a photo bot.

The chief of staff routes work into lanes. One bot looks after new opportunities. One looks after people I already work with. One drafts replies to support email. One runs quiet monitoring jobs and only speaks up when something changed. The lane bots report to the chief of staff, not to me, so I am not getting pinged by six bots about routine status.

There are also a few bots I did not expect to want:

A video editor that picks the best takes from clips I record, captions what I actually said, and sends me an edit plan before it cuts anything.
A bot whose only job is designing other bots. When I need a new one, I describe the job and it asks me a few questions and builds it.
Short lived “mission” bots for one family project, like planning a trip around my daughter’s dance performance. They are supposed to shut themselves off when the event is over.

The rules matter more than the bots

Every bot gets the same shape of instructions: what it owns, what it may do, what it must ask before doing, and when it is done. The “must ask before” list is the important part. For almost every bot it includes sending email or messages, spending money, deleting anything, and changing who has access to what.

A few rules apply to the whole fleet:

Draft, then wait. Every outgoing email or message shows up as a draft I approve. I press send.
Ask before buying. No purchase happens without an explicit yes from me.
Quiet when nothing changed. A monitoring bot that has nothing to report says nothing. No “all clear” messages.
No invented numbers. If a bot does not know something, it says so and marks it for me to fill in.
Feedback that repeats becomes a rule. If I correct the same thing twice, it gets written down as a reusable skill so every bot picks it up.

Where the code gets written

Two coding setups do the hands on technical work. Claude Code runs on an always-on Mac mini at home, so it can work with local files and apps when I am not at my desk. Cursor cloud agents handle work that should show up as a reviewable pull request. The agents open the pull request. I read it and merge it. Neither one deploys anything without my OK.

This site is an example, and it took minutes. I had the idea while driving to pick up my daughter from dance. I used Grok voice to talk through the blueprint on the way. By the time I got home, there was a pull request in GitHub ready to merge. I merged it, and the Bot Boss connected the domain on Cloudflare and set up email forwarding.

A printed page every morning

The part I like most is low tech. Every weekday morning, the Bot Boss writes a one page brief in an old newspaper layout and sends it to a laser printer at home through the Mac mini. It has the lead item for the day, a few priorities, and any kid logistics.

What broke

Plenty.

Bots that outlived their job. When I ran an audit of the whole fleet, one bot was still running a daily routine for a trip that had already ended. It was supposed to delete itself and did not.
Blank job descriptions. A couple of bots I used every day had empty profiles. They worked because of habit and memory, not because anyone wrote down what they were for. That is fragile.
Two bots, one job. Two bots were both cleaning up the same inbox.

The fix was boring: a weekly self audit that checks each bot against the same short list. One clear job? A list of what it must never do? A clear wake schedule? No padding? Anything that fails gets flagged for me to fix or retire.

What I would tell someone starting

Start with one front door bot and one specialist, not ten. Write the “must ask before” list first. Make every outgoing message a draft you approve. And audit the bots, because a bot nobody is watching will keep doing yesterday’s job.

I will write up the pieces here as I go: the photo critique panel, the morning paper, and how this site got built. One photo note is already up: six frames from one day on Mykonos.

Why do any of this? Honestly, I started just for fun.

A short note on me is on the about page.