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AF Aaron Francis Aaron Francis Software developer and database educator, co-founder of Try Hard Studios with Steve Tenuto, making video courses on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL for developers.

“I do think all of these personal agent use cases, like 'book me a flight, book me a dinner reservation', are incredibly stupid. But I do think this is incredibly valuable: let me build up my own set of tools that this very convenient agent can go and use to do things that are relevant to my life.”

Mostly Technical · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026

“I do think all of these personal agent use cases, like 'book me a flight, book me a dinner reservation', are incredibly stupid. But I do think this is incredibly valuable: let me build up my own set of tools that this very convenient agent can go and use to do things that are relevant to my life.” — Aaron Francis, Mostly Technical

Context

Ian had just described building a Claude-plus-Google-Drive setup for notes and email triage. Aaron separates the agent use case he thinks is silly from the one he thinks is valuable.

Transcript

Mostly Technical Around 27:01 into the episode
Aaron Francis

see. All

Ian Landsman

…a million emails a day, that's Pushiba from the Jesse Hanley universe of products. Thank you, sir, for sponsoring the show. Okay. So that was my weekend of AI construction. We got too much to talk about. Let's move on. Unless you have any other hot takes for that. But seems like you're on board.

Aaron Francis

I think I'm on board. I'll be curious to see how this evolves. Yeah. I am very, very on board. I hate to give you credit for this. As you'll, as you'll know. But I do think all of these like personal agent use cases where it's like, book me a flight, book me a dinner reservation. I think those are incredibly stupid. But I do think, I do think this, like, let me build up my own set of tools that then this very convenient agent can go and like do things that are relevant to my life. I think that is incredibly valuable. So I'm curious to see how it evolves.

Ian Landsman

Yeah, that's the thing. We're still early. People don't get how we're so insanely bleeding edge early. It's like, maybe there's going to be somebody who releases an app that like does all this stuff and it's super magical and will want to go over there. Or maybe this just stays in your claw or your…

Aaron Francis

I think, I think the move is continue to build up your corpus of tools and knowledge and data and then give an easy way for the new hotness to connect to it. I think that's, I think that's the move. All right. Where are we going next?

Ian Landsman

I don't know. What else you got going on? Let's do an Aaron Francis segment. You got some stuff in here.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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