The five primitives I run a whole company on

I run a consumer product company by myself. Physical inventory, two storefronts, multiple marketplaces, subscription billing, bookkeeping, tax filings, government paperwork, content in two languages, and a codebase that ships to production most weeks. Headcount: one. Not "one plus a virtual assistant." One. Three years ago this was not possible. It is also not possible today by keeping a chat window open and asking it questions. The thing that changed is not that models got smarter in the abstract. The thing that changed is that agents can now operate software the way an employee does : click through admin dashboards, fill in government forms, read email, write and deploy code, remember what happened last Tuesday, and run on a schedule without being asked. Once that is true, most of what a small company's staff does becomes a workflow you can write down, hand to an agent, and audit weekly instead of doing daily. Everything I run sits on five primitives. Tool names will churn every six months. These won't. 1. A browser-operating agent An agent that drives a real browser session with my real logins: seller dashboards, banking portals, government sites, ad platforms, email. This is the highest-leverage primitive, and it is the one most people skip. The reason is uncomfortable: roughly 90% of small-business operations live behind a login wall with no usable API. Your marketplace seller console. Your payment provider's merchant dashboard. Your country's tax portal. The grant program that still ships application forms as attachments. If your automation strategy requires an official API for everything, you will automate the 10% that already had one, and you will still be doing the other 90% by hand at 11pm. The browser agent is my hands. It logs in, navigates, reads what's on screen, fills forms, downloads documents, and reports what it found. 2. A coding agent An agent that reads my repositories, writes changes, opens a review pass, and deploys. I treat it exactly like a