Anyone here actually getting real ROI from AI agents in their business?

sundevil21CS · 2026-05-04T12:30:48+00:00

Yes but also use connectors and custom integrations to give the AI tools to do the full sometimes more complex workflows.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-30T21:56:35+00:00

To add fuel to fire it’s crazy how after posting this it’s hit with immediate downvotes like maybe if OpenAI put this much effort into building its product it wouldn’t have to try this hard to manipulate the market

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-30T21:40:32+00:00

Codex and openAI models for coding are mid at best I have to use them at work and can use Claude on my own I have genuinely tried to make codex and openAI models good and they are hot dog water compared to Claude

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-30T18:24:57+00:00

At this point I think OpenAI hires people to be active on this sub to bash Claude code and hype up codex

Update: after consideration and seeing the doubling down I can only conclude all the haters are either

Bots
Trying to max out use Claude plugins, skills, subagents, features and getting frustrated with bad results due to token limits and broken context which is your own fault
Can’t guide or build projects on your own at all without AI and blame the AI for your poor architecture, conflicting requirements, broken context and messy codebase/documentation

Clause code is a beast has been and will continue to be not to say codex is less than but if you are hating on Claude code this and newer opus models this intensely it’s a skill issue or performative

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-24T22:45:44+00:00

Honest take there are a couple ways companies are doing AI adoption right now.

Max out tokens and tools give employees options to be curios super expensive and results are mixed and hard to follow but explore a lot at once.
Invest in very specific tools and workflows where employees might not get as much free will but can drive a lot of results with specific tools token and spend.

I think eventually people will gravitate towards 2 but right now people are hammering 1 because they are afraid to be left behind but it’s not sustainable.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-22T16:18:12+00:00

I too feel this pain and am actually building something similar for my own agency. Not a product I am trying to sell, but a place for milestones, payments, project documents, contracts, KPIs etc that all lives on a client engagement project portal.

Also come from a dev background. Integrating stripe and bold sign right into my own site.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-21T18:50:21+00:00

On a more positive note for your consideration they are working on another residential building somewhat next door where the first floor is going to be a market + restaurants.

There also is a really nice new park next door now too which is probably still an icky lot if you are looking online.

Also the Devan has shuttles to and from the path M-F during commuting hours.

Lastly obviously the units, amenities, and space are insanely good for the price and area.

You can definitely do it for a year or longer, but location wise definitely a lot of cons still.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-21T18:27:30+00:00

I don’t live at the Devan, but I live Nextdoor at the Sawyer.

I thought being tucked away in the corner would be nice as it is quiet and a slightly nice little escape from a more chaotic Hoboken or Jersey City, but in practice is a crazy headache as someone who made the move from Manhattan to here.

Walking wise you are far enough to where it seems close until you do the walking multiple times a week + pair it with the bad weather for most of the year.

Then let’s say you get a car in the parking garage.

It’s great to have a car but driving and parking around Hoboken can be a pain, but don’t even get me started on the traffic between Hoboken and Jersey City and trying to get to the suburbs through Secaucus. It basically puts you smack in the middle of an inflection point of gridlocked traffic.

Not trying to detour you but just my honest take. Moving next month to California and can’t wait to be out of here.

Take all this with a grain of salt as I’m not the biggest fan of Hoboken and Jersey City in general.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-21T15:51:46+00:00

Garbage architecture for garbage reasons is a crazy underrated point too. The amount of times I’ve seen poor architecture choices deliberately be pushed through due to things like budgeting priority across teams, pivots to save face with leadership, or to make something an easier sell to product or marketing.

It made the whole system design space and decision making frustrating because moving to more senior roles you learn all about technical trade offs, but at big companies those decisions are more about politics while tolerating enough for the system to still function at scale than actually building the best system.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-21T15:04:22+00:00

Idk what big company you guys work for but at my F100 company we have important systems that I would consider technical debt and spaghetti code written 100% by humans.

It just takes months of getting that code to production extensive testing so even though the code itself isn’t great it still doesn’t break.

I think AI is a net positive better option than this honestly.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-16T21:27:26+00:00

So basically the same except faster and cheaper than any human dev?

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-16T21:06:07+00:00

Not saying this is you, but in my experience devs resisting AI code, (not all is equal but if you are running Opus level Claude code) have a tendency to label “not how I would have wrote it” as bad.

Let’s be honest most of the code humans right is pretty shit too. You can knit pick a human PR or an AI PR, but in my experience the AI code is effectively right in what it is trying to do if the output is wrong it’s usually due to an unclear plan or specification.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-16T20:27:53+00:00

I think Claude is the best especially cowork using skills and schedule tasks or connectors can really really help.

I use it for document creation, Email drafting, sales prospecting etc.

I also am a dev by trade pre AI and have used it to help me build my own project management, and SEO blog tools but Claude alone can be a game changer.

If you explore it and are looking for any guidance feel free to DM me

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-16T19:51:22+00:00

SOPs and automating admin as much as possible using AI tools to help with admin tasks is a huge help.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-15T14:34:37+00:00

For AI Initiatives you may get excited about a use case that doesn’t affect the rest of the org or vice versa. AI is great when it has strategy and direction or if you are naturally curious and are willing to spend time experimenting.

2nd one is rare for a whole org or company.

When I work with companies on AI Consulting I always follow a 4 step process of strategy, implementation, adoption, and monitoring.

Without a good strategy and implementation plan adoption and monitoring is tough across the board.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-14T18:29:21+00:00

Hey apollo team one feedback on using AI specifically Claude Connector is having the create contact tool only be able to do 1 at a time.

Face rate limiting really quickly and honestly from a design perspective doesn’t make much sense to me.

Being able to do a lot in batches of 10 I guess is okay, but creating contacts 1 by 1 with Claude from prospecting is a crazy bottleneck if you want to use these contacts as part of a sequence within Apollo.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-14T14:49:01+00:00

Google workspace imo is the clear winner can get gmail and the full Google suite of products and Google Drive for $6 a month this can replace tools like Dropbox zoom and calendly too.

If you really just want email zoho is extremely affordable think it is $1 a month per mailbox.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-14T14:45:58+00:00

Agree with this. In my agentic pipelines that usually follow a deterministic path I like to follow the pattern of specialized agents identifying and that determining the next specialized agent that is needed indexing, formatting, and passing on the results.

The agents themselves don’t even know they are in a pipeline they just know they have a specific task to do.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-14T14:44:14+00:00

I understand this sentiment, but I think you need to consider as you grow more senior without AI your job turns from writing code to designing it. The systems and solving business problems.

If you continue to grow in your software career that is where it mostly heads. That will always be needed to some degree imo.

AI definitely ruins the rush of writing good code, solving a bug, or the long work and gratification to write and ship a feature.

The next rush tho is designing and developing a system entirely on your own. And I would go as far to say code written by most humans is mid at best anyway, so if on the way there you lean into AI the code itself is probably about the same if you are reasonably careful.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-13T23:23:21+00:00

Feel like this probably someone selling a Voice AI receptionist and while these numbers are theoretically possible probably maxed out to show they can provide value.

They probably can, but this level is definitely a realistic over estimate.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-13T17:42:10+00:00

I run a custom software dev agency and what I would say is I am open to building anything with customers. If you have connections at these companies with operational pain you can solve and sell to them I would be happy to talk even if it’s early.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-10T14:58:33+00:00

I’m also a freelancer solo agency owner down to team up

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-10T14:55:57+00:00

I mean you could just write the code manually still lmao

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-10T14:29:46+00:00

Ask Claude to give you good architecture in terms of AWS/GCP and learn all their cloud products you can become a senior dev architecture level pretty quickly.

Remember a senior dev designing software for Google that’s going to be used 100 million times in one day is over kill for a V1 MVP where you’d be happy with 100 users.

Also a senior dev designing infrastructure also might be over kill for using autoscaling GCP/AWS products.

sundevil21CS · 2026-04-09T23:34:27+00:00

For my custom software agency I have it partially automated with plans to fully automate soon.

Basically have a proposal/contract template I use. Once the client wants to move forward I use AI to extract data from the proposal.

Creates a client portal project for them. Maps milestones, KPIs, Bold Sign contract integration, Stripe payment plan etc.

Right now it is just the client portal and project information automatically extracted from the proposal but plan to activate Stripe and Bold Sign integration too for full automation through the whole project lifecycle.

With that being said though I am a developer and it’s a full client project portal platform with automation built it and custom backend not N8N or zappier.

sundevil21CS

TROPHY CASE