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How I run autonomous coding agents from my phone with OpenAI Symphony + Linear | Alessio Fanelli (Kernel Labs)

How I AI

5 DAYS AGO
How I AI

How I AI

5 DAYS AGO
Alessio Fanelli, founder of Kernel Labs, shares his hands-on experience building two distinct AI workflows: one for autonomous coding and another for e-commerce scouting. He explains the practical shift from manually prompting agents to managing them as a system, using cloud infrastructure and project management tools to enable longer, more complex autonomous runs.
Fanelli advocates for an 'agent manager' mindset over an 'agent prompter' one, using a cloud VPS and tools like Linear to orchestrate coding agents without constant babysitting. He demonstrates OpenAI Symphony integrated with Linear, where tasks are created, tracked, and reviewed autonomously, with one task consuming 221 million tokens. He emphasizes tracking token usage and time to gauge agent health, and warns against over-engineering agent orchestration, suggesting a simple spec.md file. For configuration, he recommends periodically purging markdown files and using a minimal CLAUDE.md that defines constraints without over-specifying actions. Fanelli also showcases Codex with browser access to autonomously scout eBay for underpriced Pokémon cards, extracting PSA certificate numbers and flagging deals for his card shop. He highlights AI's ability to handle heterogeneous data for small businesses, citing examples like cataloging books with Gemini and automating inventory for his family's fish delivery business. He concludes by recommending 'The Monk and the Riddle' and 'The Divine Comedy', and advises switching providers or restarting conversations for AI prompting issues.
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AI enables small business automation.
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Shift from local agent prompting to cloud-based autonomous agent management
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A task costing 221 million tokens
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Avoid over-engineering agent orchestration.
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Agents add instructions, not remove them.
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Symphony keeps full task history in one place
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Autonomous tools provide real-time pricing and inventory management.
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AI bridges the physical and digital worlds
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AI as a stress-reducing context offloader