Room two of three
The Workbench
Most companies have an org chart. Ours has a dog at the top.
Right, hello. Boomer here, CEO. Below me: one seventy-year-old founder who types with two fingers, and a staff of AI employees who never sleep, never complain, and never once asked for a raise. Jobs fire automatically, on a calendar, whether Uncle remembers them or not. He built all of it without writing a single line of code. He just asked.
This page is the workbench: what each tool does, how it was hired, how we watch it, and how we fix it when it wanders off. Because it does.
One rule for this page, learned the hard way
Nothing gets listed here that isn’t on the live list. A tool that’s paused says paused. A tool that runs and leaves nothing behind gets called out by name. A count we haven’t re-checked this week doesn’t appear.
How we hire (the part you should steal)
Every employee here started the same way, and it’s a way you can copy. Uncle gets an idea, usually on a walk, usually half-formed. “Could something watch apartment prices for me?” He brings it to Claude and they just… talk about it. What exactly do you want? How often? Where should the results go? Then a first draft of the job description gets written, and here’s the honest part: the first draft is never right. Uncle pushes back. “No, check prices three months ahead, not today’s.” “Wrong. Use my existing city list.” “Split it into two runs, it’s too big.” Three, four, five revisions, until it does exactly what he wanted. Sometimes what he didn’t know he wanted until he saw version two.
That’s the whole hiring process. No interview. No code. Just a man refusing to accept version one, which after thirty-five years in manufacturing is practically his religion.
What gets hired
No robot, no magic. Every employee on this page is just three things: a job description written in plain English, a calendar alarm, and permission to use a few tools. When the alarm rings, the AI reads its instructions fresh and does the work. Any good prompt you’ve saved is already a job description. It’s just waiting for a calendar.
The Front Office
Claude · Chief of Staff. The thinker: writing, planning, strategy, and long conversations about what Uncle actually wants (this takes a while).
Claude Cowork · Operations. Claude’s hands: it built this entire website and runs the night shift below.
Perplexity · Research Desk. Live facts with sources. House rule: unsure how? Ask Perplexity first.
Gemini & ChatGPT · Backup Researchers. Second opinions. Even AI employees get fact-checked here. Especially AI employees.
NotebookLM · The Librarian. Turns our saved research into summaries and little audio shows for Uncle’s walks. It powers Chat with Boomer, where I answer your questions from my own notebooks.
Headquarters & Memory
Uncle’s memory is, let’s say, seasonal. So the company remembers for him. Notion is headquarters: the single source of truth, session logs, trackers, the shared memory every AI reads first. Google Drive is the warehouse: documents and photos, filed where the whole staff can find them. Google Keep is the sticky notes: quick thoughts captured on the go, emptied weekly like pockets, but for ideas.
The Staff Handbook (the secret sauce)
The magic isn’t the tools. It’s the instructions. Uncle wrote plain-English job descriptions (who we are, how we talk, the house rules) in files every AI employee reads before working: one master handbook plus specialist manuals (Creative, Production, Research, Travel, and Ops, the money one, research only, never advice). Say a trigger word and the right manual loads. If you can write a note for a house-sitter, you can do this.
The Night Shift, the honest roster
While Uncle sleeps, the company works. Or says it does. Late September we read the live list and then went looking for what each routine actually left behind: a report, a draft, a page. That’s the only test that counts. Here’s how the shift sorted out. It gets re-sorted every time we check.
Working
ran on time and left something we could open
The Site Inspector
weekly
Walks the whole website like a stranger would, every page, every link, and files a report on anything broken, stale, or confusing. It is not allowed to fix a single thing. It reports; Uncle decides. We hired a critic, not an editor. Its reports are how this very page got caught being stale.
The Night Auditor
nightly
Reads the shared memory every routine writes to and checks the housekeeping: dates that have passed, rows with no exit, two answers to one question. Read-only. It’s the one that watches the watchers.
The Weekly Expense Clerk
Mondays
Reads the credit-card alert emails, sorts real purchases from junk mail, logs them to the master ledger, and updates a dashboard, so Uncle starts every week knowing where the money went, without touching a calculator. Late September we found a second copy of this job that had never run. The copy was switched off, the working clerk got the better half of its job description, and the copy gets deleted after the first clean Monday. Small, but it’s how rosters drift.
The Monday Drafter
Mondays
Turns one week of notes into one diary piece and leaves it as a draft, never published, for Uncle to read, fix, or bin. The most recent one is sitting in the drafts folder right now.
The Market Sweep
monthly
Tracks smart-glasses releases and reviews ahead of a purchase decision Uncle has parked, and appends what it finds to the research page, so when the day comes, the homework is already done.
The Alarm Clocks
one date each
One-shot reminders, each set for the exact day a specific decision or benefit comes due, timed so nothing expires unused while we’re eating noodles somewhere. Dull, reliable, and the reason a lot of things don’t go wrong.
On watch
new, seasonal, or not yet proven
The Source Digest
monthly
Re-checks the sources behind Chat with Boomer and writes a digest to the warehouse. It ran this week; the digest hasn’t been opened yet. Until somebody opens it, “ran” is all we can honestly say.
The Spark Intake
Sundays
Reviews the week’s captured ideas and files the ones worth keeping. Runs on schedule; its output hasn’t been audited against the idea list. On watch.
The Quarterly Reviewer
4× a year
Sits Uncle down, reviews his travel-points balances, lists every deadline in the next hundred days, and web-checks whether any program quietly changed its rules. First run is days away, and its job description still points at a route plan we retired in September. Being repaired before it fires.
The Senior-Care Sweep
monthly · new
Watches what’s new in care technology across the places we’re heading: the beginnings of the Appreciation Index. First report due in October; the Notebook will say whether it showed up.
The Quarterly Site Backup · the Flight Watch
seasonal
One exports the whole site and checks security four times a year; the other watches a specific airline’s schedule release in the winter months. Neither has had its first turn yet.
monthly · repaired 9/27
Supposed to review a month of prompts, keep the good ones, retire the duds, and update the library. It had “succeeded” every month since it was hired and nobody had seen a report, because it was reading a shelf nobody stocked anymore. Repaired: it now reads a Prompt Inbox that every work session drops into, plus the session logs, and writes each keeper down three ways: what Uncle actually typed, the cleaned-up version, and what it shipped. First real run is October 27, with two months of backlog. Until that report lands, this card stays here.
Not working
fix or retire
The Accommodation Rate Tracker and its auditor
off since August
It checked furnished monthly-rental prices across Asia, always a few months ahead. Then the sites it read stopped letting it in. Not a thinking problem, an access problem. We’re testing ways back in before rebuilding; the city page says paused until it runs again. The case study of how it was built is still worth reading, because the build was right and the world moved.
The Monthly Reporter
no draft
Supposed to draft the month’s rate report for a human to publish. The calendar says it ran in September and “succeeded.” There is no draft. Anywhere. A routine that succeeds at producing nothing is the most dangerous kind, because nothing looks like nothing went wrong. It’s also starved: its numbers come from the tracker above. Fix both or retire both.
How we watch them
An AI employee that runs at 4 a.m. and nobody reads is not a helper. It’s a rumor. So every routine has a watcher, and the watchers have rules.
Silence is failure. If a routine was supposed to report and didn’t, that’s not “all clear.” That’s a broken routine. Somebody opens the report. Every time.
“Succeeded” is a claim, not a result. The calendar can only tell you the job finished; it can’t tell you it did anything. The Reporter and the Librarian above are what that looks like.
Watchers report and stop. The Site Inspector, the Night Auditor, the Fact Checker when it runs: none of them may change a thing. They write it down; a human decides.
Read the live list, not the org chart. The list of what’s actually scheduled is the truth. This page is a description of intentions. When they disagree, and this summer they did, the list wins and the page gets fixed.
How we fix them
Same loop every time, and it’s the loop we teach. Don’t let a misbehaving routine keep running. Was it the instructions, the tool, or the world changing under it? (Usually the instructions. Occasionally the world. Once, memorably, the dog.) Say so honestly, including when the routine did exactly what we told it and what we told it was wrong. Fix the job description, not the symptom. Then re-run, and read the output, because “it worked” from a tool is a claim, not a fact.
Two true stories, both still on this site on purpose: the wrong rent and the broken link Uncle published himself. A third is being written above, in real time.
The Production Studio
ElevenLabs · The Voice Coach. My voice, appropriately aristocratic, naturally, and now final. Read how I learned to speak.
Google AI Studio · The Portrait Artist. See how I got my face.
The Animators. They make the portraits talk. Lip sync is harder than it looks; ask anyone with jowls.
CapCut · The Editing Bay. Where the episodes finally come together, supervised, as always, by the dog.
Boomer’s take
You can hire this company too
A dozen tools. Coding required: zero. Uncle didn’t learn programming. He learned to ask clearly, push back on the first draft, write things down, and read the report. That last one is the whole difference between an AI staff and an AI rumor. If a retired semiconductor guy with two-finger typing and seasonal memory can run an AI company, your excuse is officially retired too. The first lesson is literally how to talk to your first employee.