AI promised us legions of agents to do work for us while we kick back and relax. Time to make that promise real.

The early promise of AI was that it would take busywork off our plates so we could focus on more important things: strategic and creative work, the uniquely valuable things that only we can do, or even — and this is wild — spending time with friends and family or hobbies or leisure.

So far, that promise has been somewhat… exaggerated. AI seems to be causing everyone to work more.

For this challenge, we want to get back to the original goal: build an app that does work in the background while you’re focused on what’s actually important. Maybe it taps you on the shoulder for approvals via text message or chat when needed, or maybe it’s fully autonomous.

But whatever it does, it should allow you to be out in the world, being a person, while it’s doing valuable work in the background.

Sponsored by Inngest (https://codetv.link/inngest)

The Tool: Inngest

Your app must use Inngest as part of the build.

Inngest provides a quick-to-learn API for adding much better workflows to applications. Break the app into steps, and each step becomes a durable process that can be retried, visualized, and easily debugged.

It’s extremely powerful for stitching together multiple services and/or complicated workflows into something that’s comprehensible by both people and agents, as well as resilient against intermittent interruptions and third-party flakiness.

We use it for automating a bunch of CodeTV workflows and it rules.