AI tools that do my busywork
I build small AI tools for the jobs I don’t want to do by hand: finding customers, sorting leads and running coding agents.
By Jacob Reid · Burlington, Ontario
Running a one-person shop means a lot of small, repetitive jobs. Where a job is mostly reading, sorting and deciding, I try to hand it to an AI tool and check the result.
LeadScout
A desktop app that finds local businesses with no website. It checks each one for a site that search engines missed, then uses an AI model to score how likely the business is to say yes. I call the best leads first instead of working down a list.
Outreach scoring
Before an outreach agent emails a solar installer about label kits, a scoring step rates the company from 1 to 10, explains the score, and writes an opening line when the fit is good. Low scores don’t get an email.
Mayhem
A Mac app for running Claude, Codex and plain shell terminals side by side in one window. It keeps a list of project folders, so new agents open in the right place, and it has a manager for the skills those agents use.
If a job is mostly reading and sorting, a model can do the first pass. I just check its work.