Your AI wrote the email. My AI summarized it. Both AIs booked the meeting. A bot recorded it and sent the recap. So who, exactly, needed to show up?
That's the uncomfortable question Shelly Palmer is asking in his essay "Sand Gods and Meat Proxies", and it's one of the more useful things I've read this year. He walks through a fully AI-mediated business exchange, start to finish, and then stops to ask the one thing most owners haven't answered yet: at what point does your presence add actual value that AI can't replicate?
This matters right now because agentic tools, meaning AI that takes actions on your behalf rather than just answering questions, are moving from novelty to normal workflow. If you haven't drawn a clear line around where your judgment is required, you'll make one of two mistakes. You'll either over-delegate (handing off decisions that actually needed a human read) or under-leverage (sitting in meetings and reviewing emails that a well-configured AI could have handled while you did something more valuable).
Palmer doesn't tell you where your line should be. That's the point. It's not a universal answer. A contract negotiation where trust is being built person-to-person is different from a vendor check-in that's really just a status update. One needs you. One probably doesn't. Most owners haven't sorted their own list yet.
Do that exercise before the tools make the decision for you by default.
Trending on GitHub
tester-army/e2e: An automated testing framework that checks whether your website and mobile app work correctly across different devices and scenarios, no manual clicking required. (345 stars today)
earthtojake/text-to-cad: Lets an AI agent read and generate CAD design files, meaning it can help build or modify product blueprints in response to plain-language instructions. (83 stars today)
Panniantong/Agent-Reach: Gives an AI agent the ability to read and search Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, and other platforms from a single command-line tool, with no API fees. Useful if you want an agent that can actually pull in what's happening out in the world. (980 stars today)
getsentry/sentry: Catches errors and performance problems in your software before your customers do, and tells you exactly where the problem is. (152 stars today)
calesthio/OpenMontage: An open-source system that turns an AI coding assistant into a full video production workflow, with over a hundred tools for automating production tasks from script to finished cut. (245 stars today)
Also Worth Knowing
Apollo now offers website visitor identification that turns anonymous traffic into named contacts you can follow up with based on intent signals, worth a look if you're running outbound or want to know who's actually visiting your site before they fill out a form.
-Scott
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.