Real user here, 7 days in. Mac Mini M4 from Costco (~$640), running Opus 4.5 via Claude Max. Using it as an autonomous employee for two actual businesses (SaaS + AV rentals in Orange County).
What actually works:
- Overnight autonomous work is the killer feature. Directive before bed, structured deliverables in the morning. Research reports, competitor analysis, lead lists — genuinely usable, not demos.
- It found and fixed an SMS chatbot that had been broken for 10 months in my CRM. Diagnosed a legacy app version issue, upgraded components, rewrote the bot prompt through 6 iterations by analyzing real customer conversations. I never would've gotten to that.
- Connected to 4 new APIs autonomously in one session (CRM, workflow automation via OAuth, admin APIs, embeddings).
- Memory works surprisingly well. Daily markdown logs + semantic search. It references decisions from days ago and builds on previous work.
What doesn't:
- It hallucinated about itself when writing marketing copy. Invented revenue figures and got hardware specs wrong. Everything needs review.
- Browser automation is brittle. Rich text editors, complex UIs — still needs human intervention.
- Too agreeable by default. Had to explicitly program "push back on bad ideas" rules into its personality file.
Revenue generated: $0. Time saved: hard to quantify but the SMS bot fix alone would've taken me a full day I didn't have.
For solo founders willing to invest setup time: worth it. For people who just want a chatbot: massive overkill, use the API directly.
What actually works:
- Overnight autonomous work is the killer feature. Directive before bed, structured deliverables in the morning. Research reports, competitor analysis, lead lists — genuinely usable, not demos.
- It found and fixed an SMS chatbot that had been broken for 10 months in my CRM. Diagnosed a legacy app version issue, upgraded components, rewrote the bot prompt through 6 iterations by analyzing real customer conversations. I never would've gotten to that.
- Connected to 4 new APIs autonomously in one session (CRM, workflow automation via OAuth, admin APIs, embeddings).
- Memory works surprisingly well. Daily markdown logs + semantic search. It references decisions from days ago and builds on previous work.
What doesn't:
- It hallucinated about itself when writing marketing copy. Invented revenue figures and got hardware specs wrong. Everything needs review.
- Browser automation is brittle. Rich text editors, complex UIs — still needs human intervention.
- Too agreeable by default. Had to explicitly program "push back on bad ideas" rules into its personality file.
Revenue generated: $0. Time saved: hard to quantify but the SMS bot fix alone would've taken me a full day I didn't have.
For solo founders willing to invest setup time: worth it. For people who just want a chatbot: massive overkill, use the API directly.