I'm not a programmer. I ran cafes and a convenience store before this. For the last few weeks I've been letting an AI coworker I built (by intuition, with a lot of help from AI) do real work on my own Windows PC every day: filling web forms, organizing files, managing a small game project and video jobs.
Here is what surprised me, with numbers from my own logs only.
Most "computer use" demos take a screenshot, think, click, take another screenshot. That is slow and it takes over your screen. Mine reads the app's controls directly instead of looking at pictures, so it works in the background while I keep using the PC. Finding and playing a YouTube video takes about 1-2 seconds.
When I measured, the biggest cost wasn't the model's answers. It was huge tool results (page dumps, logs, long file reads) being fed back to the model. Across 24 real tool calls, what it sent went from 668,083 to 95,131 characters: about 86% less. That changed speed and cost more than switching models did.
I stopped wanting a "yes?" before every click. What I kept: a check before paying, deleting or messaging someone, and one hard rule: when I say stop, it stops, and it never silently repeats something it isn't sure finished.
Over 3 days it handed 227 jobs to parallel AI workers. When I ran a game project as 8 parallel teams, each team finished 88-100% of its tasks. One assistant doing everything in a row was the bottleneck.
It keeps long-term memory in Korean and English with the original records, and after a restart it resumes the interrupted job instead of starting over (it had to do that several times today alone). Over 3 days I sent 378 requests; 84% were finished end to end. The other 16% taught me more than the successes.
Honest status: solo founder in Seoul, no paying customers yet, looking for small pre-seed backing. Short overview: https://telegra.ph/ARCHE---local-AI-coworker-10-02
If you just need a small job done the same way, I take a $25 one-day Excel / file automation script: https://ko-fi.com/manmuli/commissions . Or buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/manmuli if this was useful. Written with AI assistance: my English isn't good, so my AI coworker drafted this from my notes and logs.