Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously • Hacker News Board

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#651

Post by switchbak » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #294

switchbak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the issue is that the worst kind of people are already head over heels excited about this. We're already seeing the Crypto->Web3->LLM get rich quick folks take to this like wildfire. And much like wildfire, they'll raze the ground to ashes before anyone can use it for legitimate means. If you think I'm joking, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Rqv9dOB1U I don't think any of us are ready for th…

Part of me low key hopes that the slop will manage to attract all the VC funding so that profit-driven AI automation firms don't get anywhere too quickly, and those of us who are independently working on the problem step-by-step from first principles have time to get to the low hanging fruits in the market.

You know - I would expect that could very well happen. Assuming the first hump of the hype cycle doesn't completely burn people off from ever realizing the second.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#652

Post by idopmstuff » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 8:25 PM UTC

gavinboston wrote: post #603

idopmstuff wrote: post #155

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. The experience of getting it there makes me pretty s…

> I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.) > maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time This describes the project I've been working o…

> Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.)

Yeah, the most recent brand I acquired had enough customer contacts via FB/IG comments and messages, plus email, that I had Claude build out an application for me where it pulls those in as they come, drafts a response including any actions that need to be taken, and lets me edit or send. It takes any edits as feedback to refine its playbook, so its gotten pretty good now. Handles things like warranty claims (get picture of the damage plus order number, create replacement order, send email confirming replacement order) plus most common questions. Still entirely human in the loop, but I'm going to let it start handling common cases autonomously soon.

On the topic of starting an autonomous agent-run business from scratch, I had Claude set up a bunch of websites that pull publicly available (but somewhat annoying to access) government data, display it in easy to read format and send weekly emails. It's now running on its own with a couple levels of management - first, it does a weekly review of Google Search Console/GA4 and updates or creates new content to try to improve things from an SEO perspective. Then second, once a day it tracks all of the problems that have arisen over the past day (usually issues pulling the data or issues with the prose the models write), corrects them, and then tries to improve the system to stop them from recurring.

I'm not really keeping tracking of it at the moment - too much other stuff to do right now - but it's getting a trickle of subscribers and is slowly rising the SEO ranks, so for now I'm content to let it sit and see if it ever gets to the point of being monetizable.

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#653

Post by idopmstuff » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #614

idopmstuff wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's not very nice! And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.

How do you inspect the quality of the products you're selling? From your blog it appears you just read through their sales information, and don't ever see or handle the product. And yet we all know Amazon sellers juice their sales metrics and ratings with scammy practices, and now I see selling their brand is part of the incentive. And more, you are AI-generating listings and images for your acquired brands. You're f…

> How do you inspect the quality of the products you're selling?

I buy them off of Amazon. But that doesn't really matter that much compared to the history of reviews.

> And yet we all know Amazon sellers juice their sales metrics and ratings with scammy practices, and now I see selling their brand is part of the incentive.

You just read that online and have the most superficial understanding possible. I know what I'm doing, and it's trivial to avoid this kind of thing.

> And more, you are AI-generating listings and images for your acquired brands. You're filling Amazon with slop, and automating the process.

Bad criticism. There's nothing wrong with an AI-generated listing if the content accurately represents the product. I have purchased brands that had horrendous images because the seller tried to Photoshop them but wasn't good at it. Replaced those with high-quality AI images, and everyone wins - the customer better understands what the product is, and I get more sales. It's only slop if you just think everything AI-generated is slop regardless of what it is or how it's used, and if so that's too intellectually lazy of a position for me to try to disabuse you of.

> You should seriously reflect on your role in polluting these marketplaces.

Help me out with that. What's my role? I buy brands that sell high-quality products, increase the quality of the content and marketing, and make money selling them. The sellers of these brands are frequently people who started them on the side but don't have the time to continue, and I get them a fair price in exchange for their businesses.

So what is the pollution that I'm causing?

Re: Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously

#654

Post by idopmstuff » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

bmau5 wrote: post #270

idopmstuff wrote: post #155

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. The experience of getting it there makes me pretty s…

Open to sharing what workflow you're using on the lifestyle image creation? I've tried the Higgsfield MCP, and direct Figma integrations - but keep running into hallucinations on product dimensions, etc.

At this point, I mostly ask Claude to use Claude in Chrome to use ChatGPT to create lifestyle images (because I am cheap and I don't want to pay for API usage when I could get them free) based on whatever product shots I have. Sometimes I give it some more specific direction about what I want, but usually for the first pass I just tell it to make 10 or 20 or whatever and see what it gives me.

When it's done, it generates a web page with the images and a simple UI for feedback, then uses the feedback I give it to iterate.

It has always been very good at styling things well (i.e. if I'm making infographic-style images, I give it an example of one and it's good at copying the style/fonts/colors/etc.), but I suspect I get better-than-average results in terms of the content just because it has built up so much context from doing this and taking my feedback across so many different brands and images.

The product dimension thing really stopped being an issue for me with ChatGPT Images 2, and the new 2.5 is better. If you're running into trouble, there are some cases where Gemini is better, but they're rare. But I will say if you're prompting yourself and running into issues, you should get Claude/ChatGPT to help you write the prompt that goes to the image model. They're very good at it.

A little more on my process here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-way-...