Systems · 2026 · Solo build
AI agents that run a business on their own, inside limits I set.
BusinessBuilder is an autonomous AI system that finds business ideas, builds the plan, and then carries it out itself, with no approval click for each step. A Python and FastAPI backend runs the agents on a schedule, and they drive real Chrome windows on my machine to do the work. Safety comes from hard limits instead of a person in the loop: a spending cap, a kill switch, and a rule that only money in the account counts.
The first version asked me to approve every step. That was safe, and it also meant I was the bottleneck. Now I pick how much freedom it gets, from hands-on to fully self-driving. In self-driving mode I don't approve anything. The agents pick a venture, set it up, and keep going on their own.
A background daemon ticks on a schedule. Each tick, agents at nine desks (research, audit, workshop, treasury and more) research, build, and follow up, and their state lives in plain files so a crash never loses the thread. There's no approve button in the loop. The only things that still stop and ask me are the ones that can't be undone, like refunds, contracts, and shutting a venture down that still owes someone something.
Plenty of the work only exists behind a website: listing a gig, filling a form, checking an inbox. So the agents open a Chrome window on my machine and do it the way a person would. That's my own Understudy project doing the driving, a local agent that works one small step at a time and writes every step down. It runs in a window behind mine so it never steals my screen.
Freedom needs limits that can't be talked around. Every action goes through a gate that checks the daily budget, how confident the agent is, and whether the move even makes sense yet. Outbound email has its own sending caps and reputation checks. A global kill switch stops everything at once, and if something is broken the system stays shut instead of guessing.
BusinessBuilder only counts money that actually landed in the account, confirmed by a payment webhook, not projected revenue. That number decides which ventures get more effort and which get paused. Every token spent is logged in the same ledger, so I can always see whether it's ahead.
FastAPI serves the API and streams live activity to a React dashboard. The Hermes agent runtime, vendored into the repo, runs the tool loop. Secrets sit in the Windows credential store, and everything runs locally on my own machine.
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