Notes
About this guide
Agents 101 is a free collection of real jobs people already gave to an AI agent, written for small businesses and anyone who would rather not become a prompt engineer.
New to AI agents?
A chatbot answers a question. An agent tries to finish a job: open the inbox, draft the note, pull the receipts, publish the ad. You decide what it may touch. The jobs here include work that went well and a few that went sideways.
How to read a job
Start with the fault. If it sounds like your week, keep going.
- Read what actually happened.
- Read the caution before you try anything like it.
- If a prompt is included, copy it and change the names, dollars, and accounts so they match you.
- Stay nearby for anything that spends money, emails a customer, or goes out in public.
Top, on the lookup page, is a short starter list chosen because the job is easy to picture. It is not a popularity contest. New this week means the job was added to this guide in the last 7 days. The date on the row is when the original person posted. The address bar keeps the search, the kind of job, and the tool, so you can send someone the same list. Press Ctrl K, or Command K on a Mac, from any page to jump to the search.
About the numbers
This guide passes the stories along. It does not sell the tools or promise the same result. When a person says they saved money, that figure is their report. We did not audit it.
Who keeps it
Bryan Barnhill keeps Agents 101. He runs AI Without the Overwhelm workshops and an AI & Coffee meetup in the Indianapolis area, for people who want AI to be useful without the flood of jargon.
Right now the guide shows Meta Muse. More tools can be switched on later without rewriting the site.
Send a job
If you saw a real person hand a job to an agent, suggest the use case. A useful note says what they asked for, what happened, which tool they used, and where you read it.