I Set Up an AI Agent That Works While I Sleep - Here's What Happened (MaxClaw AI Agent)

Alex Rozdolskiy, a developer, set up an AI agent — think of it like a personal assistant that lives on your phone and never sleeps — using a tool called MaxClaw (Source 2). He gave it a list of tasks before bed: research competitors, generate content ideas, summarize articles, organize data. When he woke up, the agent had completed 47 tasks without any input from him (Source 2).

Here's what the agent actually did: It browsed websites, extracted information, compared data across sources, generated draft outlines, and organized everything into reports. These weren't simple copy-paste jobs — the agent made decisions about what information mattered and how to structure it (Source 2). MaxClaw runs on Claude AI, the same technology behind ChatGPT-style chatbots, but designed to handle multi-step workflows instead of just answering questions (Source 1).

The setup runs entirely from a phone. No server required, no coding expertise needed. You tell the agent what to do in plain English ("research my top 5 competitors and list their pricing"), set it running, and it works in the background (Source 1). If you've ever set a download to run overnight, it's the same concept — except instead of downloading files, it's completing work tasks.

The cost? Around $20-30/month for the AI service that powers it (Source 1). That's comparable to Spotify or your gym membership, but for a worker that never clocks out.

This crosses the line from "AI can help" to "AI can replace entire chunks of your workday." We've had chatbots for two years — you ask a question, it answers. These agents are different: you describe an outcome ("I need a competitive analysis by morning"), and it figures out the steps to get there. No need to prompt it 47 separate times (Source 2).

The uncomfortable truth is that most "knowledge work" breaks down into tasks an AI agent can now handle: scanning sources, extracting key points, drafting summaries, comparing options. If your job involves spending hours researching things online and compiling what you found into documents, you're now competing with software that works for $1/hour and never sleeps. This isn't theoretical — someone already woke up to 47 completed tasks (Source 2).

Here's what most coverage gets wrong: They frame this as a productivity boost, like getting a faster laptop. It's actually a cost replacement. Those 47 tasks represent maybe 6-8 hours of human work. If you're a freelancer billing hourly, that's $300-500 in revenue that just became a $2 operating cost. If you're an employee, you just freed up a full workday — which means your employer needs fewer people doing what you do. The real question isn't "will this help me work faster?" It's "will my role still exist when everyone has access to this?"