The brand work we did at Wild Earth was real. We were selling through Instagram and Facebook, and on those channels emotional resonance isn't a nice-to-have, it's the mechanism. The photography, the dog stories, the community, the tone of voice. People were scrolling and we had about two seconds to make them feel something. It worked. Brand investment drove revenue in a way that was measurable and direct.
My goal: run my entire work life through a terminal. I'm about 60% there. Here's what the setup looks like.
OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open-source AI agent of 2026, with over 100,000 GitHub stars and a skills ecosystem anyone can extend. I built a skill that replaced my HelloFresh subscription, and what it took to build it says something about where a lot of billion-dollar convenience businesses are headed.
OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in September 2025. By March 2026, it was dead. Five months, roughly 30 merchants out of millions adopted it, and they've since pivoted back to routing users to merchant sites. Most coverage focused on what went wrong technically: product data too messy to standardize at scale, no sales tax infrastructure, merchant onboarding described as "arduous." Those things are all true. But there's a more fundamental reason the post-mortems have mostly missed.
Urgency works on humans. Scarcity works on humans. Beautiful photography works on humans. You've spent years getting these things right — the above-the-fold her
Amazon blocks agent crawlers. That's not a technical decision. It's a strategic one.
When an AI agent visits your store, it doesn't see your homepage or your brand story. It reads product identifiers, schema markup, protocol manifests, and check
The next wave of buyers won't have feelings about your brand. They'll have decision criteria. AI agents are already making purchasing decisions in software, and
91% of online stores are invisible to AI agents. The gap isn't traffic and it isn't brand. It's that the data isn't structured correctly.
For 30 years, commerce ran on two categories. Both assumed the buyer was a human. That assumption just broke.
Private equity figured out where durable value lives before most founders did. Not software. Boring businesses with an AI layer on top.
ChatGPT Instant Checkout launched on February 16. Within days, 800 million users had a direct checkout path through an AI agent. Glossier, SKIMS, Vuori — alread