My Updated Agentic Stack for Life and Business

Most "AI productivity" setups are chatbots you still have to babysit. You open a tab, explain the context, copy the answer somewhere else, and do the actual work yourself.

The setup that finally stuck for me is different. Each tool is an agent that owns one job end to end, reaches me by text, and only pulls me in when a decision is mine to make.

Two more tools sit underneath them: one turns my voice into text everywhere, and one captures my meetings. And at the end, the agents I trust to run parts of my business.

Here's the stack, what each tool actually did for me, and what it costs.

The rule: one agent, one job

The mistake I made early was stacking overlapping tools. Two of them would both "help" with email, and I'd spend more time deciding where to go than doing the work.

Now every agent has a clear lane:

• Email: Slashy
• Scheduling: Howie, moving to Slashy
• Travel and experiences: Odessia
• Everything else in my life: Hark
• Voice input: Wispr Flow
• Meeting notes: Granola

If a task doesn't clearly belong to one of them, it goes to Hark.

Email: Slashy, run from my texts

In my last email post I ran email through Superhuman and Claude Code. That worked at my desk. It didn't work when I was away from it, which is most of the time.

Slashy is an AI-native email client (YC-backed) that sits on top of Gmail. It drafts replies in your voice, tracks the replies you owe, and labels importance without you building rules. The part that changed my habits is its iMessage agent.

Real-time texts for the emails that matter

When an important email lands, Slashy texts me. Not a push notification buried with 40 others, an actual message I can reply to.

I answer wherever I am. Slashy finds the thread, drafts the reply with full context, and sends it back for me to approve or tweak. I never open the inbox.

"Clear out the junk"

The other move I use constantly: I text Slashy something like "archive anything unimportant from today." It handles it.

Inbox cleanup used to be a 15-minute chore I'd put off. Now it's one text.

Tip: Start with VIP alerts only. Tell Slashy which senders matter, let it text you for those, and expand once you trust its judgment.

Cost: $30/month, or $25/month billed annually. Gmail and Google Workspace today, Outlook supported too.

Scheduling: Howie today, Slashy next

Howie has been my scheduling secretary for over a year. You CC it on a thread or text it, and it negotiates the time, follows up with people who go quiet, and puts the event on your calendar. Behind the AI there's a 24/7 team of human EAs catching mistakes.

It's very good at that one job. That's also the reason I'm moving off it.

Slashy now handles calendar and scheduling inside the same inbox and the same text thread. One agent that already knows the context of the email beats two agents passing a thread between them.

Cost: Howie starts at $25/month on shared credits. Moving scheduling to Slashy means one fewer subscription.

Travel: Odessia plans the trip

Odessia is an AI travel concierge from Sonder co-founder Francis Davidson, backed by Sequoia. You text it what you want, and it comes back with options, live prices, and a plan. It's also an IATA-registered agency, so it can book directly.

The day trip test

I recently used it to plan a day trip with my girlfriend to Hammond Castle on the North Shore. Odessia laid out the day and recommended a handful of genuinely solid restaurants nearby, not the generic top-10 list you get from a search.

What I like: it learns your preferences over time and can watch prices and openings for months ahead, so it doesn't just answer once and forget.

Cost: free. Odessia earns commission on bookings.

Life admin: Hark does the actual work

Planning is half the job. Somebody still has to buy the tickets, pay the bill, and fill out the form. That's Hark.

Hark is a personal AI with long-term memory and its own cloud computer. It runs a real browser, signs into my accounts, and finishes tasks on sites that have no API. It checks with me before spending money or sending anything in my name.

What it handled for me this month

• Booked the day trip. Odessia planned it; Hark bought the castle tickets and put it on my calendar.
• Caught a bill I thought was on autopay. I'd moved apartments. Hark noticed my new electric account had an unpaid balance carried over from a previous bill, which I assumed was on autopay. It walked me through what happened, paid the past-due amount with my approval, and enrolled the account in autopay so it can't happen again.

That second one is the real value. I didn't ask about my electric bill. Hark surfaced a problem I didn't know I had, then fixed it end to end.

Cost: free to start, with paid plans up to $100/month for heavier usage.

Voice: Wispr Flow for everything I type

Most of what I "type" to these agents, I actually say. Wispr Flow is speech-to-text that works in any app, on my computer and my iPhone.

On the Mac, I hold a key, talk, and let go. The text lands in whatever field I'm in, already cleaned up: filler words gone, punctuation in place, lists formatted. On the iPhone it replaces the keyboard, so the same thing works in Messages, email, and Slack.

It learns names and jargon, and the dictionary syncs across devices. That matters when half my texts are to agents and the other half are product names it would otherwise mangle.

Cost: free with a weekly word limit. Pro is $15/month, or $12/month billed annually, for unlimited dictation.

Meetings: Granola takes the notes

Granola records my meetings without sending a bot into the call. It listens through my computer's audio, so it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or anything else, and nobody gets a weird "Notetaker has joined" message.

I jot rough notes if I want, and Granola fills them in from the transcript when the meeting ends: decisions, action items, the details I missed. The iPhone app handles in-person conversations and phone calls the same way.

Audio isn't stored. Granola keeps the transcript and my notes, then deletes the recording.

Cost: free for unlimited notes, with the last 30 days visible. Business is $14/month for full history.

Tools for business

Everything above runs my personal life. At work the bar is higher. I don't want "AI features." I want agents that are better than any human at one area of the business: support, sales, finance. Each one owns its lane the same way the personal stack does.

Support: Fin is a team member, not a chatbot

At Aura, Fin by Intercom handles more than 60% of our support load. We don't treat it like a widget on the help page. We treat it like a teammate, which means giving it what you'd give a new hire: good docs, clear policies, and feedback when it gets something wrong.

Fin answers across chat and email, takes actions in connected systems, and hands off to a human when it should. The pricing model is the tell that it's built as an agent: you pay $0.99 per outcome, meaning a resolved conversation or a successful handoff, not per seat. If it doesn't do the job, you don't pay for it.

Sales: testing Lightfield, leaning toward Monaco

For CRM, I've been testing Lightfield. It's an AI-native CRM that builds itself from your email, calendar, and meetings, so nobody updates fields by hand. That alone beats Salesforce-era CRMs.

But I'm seriously considering switching to Monaco, because it's more proactive. Monaco doesn't wait for you to ask. It builds your target market, runs outbound, flags deals that are going cold, and tells you what to do next, like having a CRO sitting inside the tool. It comes from Sam Blond, Brex's former CRO, and is backed by Founders Fund and Benchmark.

That's the difference I care about. A CRM that remembers everything is good. A sales agent that acts on it without being asked is the goal.

Banking: Mercury, my strong recommendation

If you're starting or running a company, open a Mercury account. Banking is $0/month with no minimums or overdraft fees. Domestic and USD international wires are free, and FDIC coverage reaches up to $5M through partner-bank sweep networks.

It's the finance tool I recommend to every founder who asks. Checking, savings, cards, and bill pay live in one place, without the fees and paperwork of a traditional bank.

Note: Mercury is a fintech, not a bank. Accounts are held at its partner banks, which is how the expanded FDIC coverage works.

What the personal stack costs

• Slashy: $25–30/month
• Howie: from $25/month (going away)
• Odessia: free
• Hark: free to start
• Wispr Flow: free, or $12–15/month for Pro
• Granola: free, or $14/month for full history

Once scheduling moves to Slashy, the paid core is about $25–30/month, and every other tool has a free tier you can start on. Compare that to an executive assistant at $25–40/hour.

Where this falls short

Being honest about the gaps:

• It needs access. These agents are only as good as what you connect: email, calendar, accounts. If you're not comfortable granting that, this won't work for you.
• You still approve the important stuff. That's by design. Expect to spend a few minutes a day saying yes or no.
• New tools, rough edges. Odessia is still early, and Slashy is shipping fast. Expect some features to change.
• A team needs more. This is built for one person's life. A founder with a team may still want a human EA for gatekeeping and logistics.

What changes

The shift isn't that AI writes my emails. It's that my phone's text thread became the control panel for my life.

I talk instead of type. Meetings take their own notes. Important email reaches me as a text. Trips get planned in a conversation. Bills, tickets, and forms get handled by an agent that only asks me for a yes. I spend less time in apps and more time actually doing the things they were supposed to free me up for.