Episode 22 · · 00:33:31
AI Agents for Agencies: Hype vs What Actually Works
Chris is back from Bangkok, and even in the most AI-forward crowd, most of us are still prompting by hand while fully autonomous agents stay a dream. So we get into the AI agents that actually work today, plus the PHP vulnerability that leaked while Chris was on a plane and a certificate authority whose private key was literally the number 4.
Hosted by Chris Willow and Alex Zakka from Wayfront.
Show notes
Full show notes
Chris is back from Bangkok, where he met online business people and a few Wayfront customers, and hiring someone good with AI came up a lot. Chris figures a smart person gets AI-pilled within a week of signing up for ChatGPT. Alex pushes back, since bolting AI onto your old way of working only gets you small gains. We also talk about an SEO agency owner who built brand new services that AI can deliver from scratch, and why digital PR still runs on people with connections.
Then there's the security stretch. A PHP vulnerability leaked before the patch while Chris was on a plane with patchy internet, so Wayfront had already switched off the session upload feature tied to it, and Chris gave Stefan the access to rebuild the infrastructure on the patched PHP. Someone even put Bitcoin on a website and dared people to steal it, to prove the bug was real. Chris ordered physical YubiKeys, Alex keeps his AI locked to a single folder, and a certificate authority turned out to have a private key that was literally the number 4.
On the agent side, Chris tested MCP events that let an agent react the moment something happens in Wayfront, so it doesn't have to check in every five minutes. It's a ChatGPT-only beta for now, so it's not shipping yet. He's also running an agent on the Wayfront deals pipeline, which is where the new time-in-stage timer came from. And the fully autonomous agent everyone has been sold? Still a dream. The one that works for Chris is a scheduled job that checks disclosed vulnerabilities every hour.
Plus Alex debloating his TV with Claude, France's proposed per-gigabyte internet tax, how using your own product led to the new sidebar, file previews in Wayfront, Claude Design leaving its standalone site, and AI-generated billboards all over Lebanon, with Chris's take on farm to table AI vs slop at scale.