Hi, and thanks for being here.

You signed up on SoloByte, the blog where I write about the AI tools and systems I actually use to run my freelance life. I'm a product designer and 3D artist in Portugal, running several projects at once with a team of exactly one. Me.

This is the first email I've ever sent to this list, so let me set the expectation up front. You'll hear from me about once a month. No spam, no affiliate dumps, no "10 AI tools that will change your life." Just what's genuinely working in my own setup, and the honest parts about what isn't.

Here's what's been going on.

What I published

The AI System I Built to Run My Freelance Life

The whole setup, and the stupid moment that started it (I forgot to pay my car insurance until my accountant called me three days after it lapsed). An 8am brief straight to my phone, an agent that runs my inbox, one that polishes my writing, and one that drills me on languages. This is the overview.

I Gave My AI a Team of Coworkers

The walkthrough people kept asking for. I stopped treating my AI as one chatbot and started treating it as a small team, each with a name and a single job. A chief of staff, a CFO, a writer, a blog editor. Why that works better than one big assistant, and how each one connects to my phone.

One thing you can steal today

If you take a single idea from all of this, take this one: give each AI job a name and one job only.

For a year I ran everything through one general chat, and it had a ceiling I kept hitting. It wrote my client emails in the same flat voice it used to explain a tax rule, and it forgot who I was every new conversation. The moment I split it into small, named roles, each with a clear job and only the tools it needs, everything got sharper. It's also just easier to think "this is a job for the finance one" than "which prompt did I use for invoicing again."

You don't need Claude Code or twelve agents to try this. Even inside a normal chat, start a conversation with "You are my finance assistant. Your only job is X. You do not do anything else." One role, one job. Start with one.

What's coming next

I'm a 3D artist, so the next piece is one I've wanted to do for a while: I'm running the same model through every major AI 3D generator, importing each one into Blender, and seeing what actually holds up in real client work and what falls apart the moment you look closely. Nobody tests them on the same object. I will.

That's the next email. Thanks for reading this far.

Sérgio

Everything I publish is an honest test, run with my own accounts and my own money. If I ever recommend something with an affiliate link, I'll say so, and it won't change the verdict.