A solo developer just released a free, open-source set of AI employees that run on a schedule on your own machine. Eight business roles. Sixty routines. No monthly fee.
What's happening
Mark Fulton, the independent developer behind the 340,000-member Vibe Coding is Life community, published ai-employees on GitHub this past Friday under the MIT license. The repo ships eight business roles: GTM Engineer, SEO/AEO Employee, Web Dev Employee, Social Media Employee, Ad Manager Employee, Sales Employee, Customer Satisfaction Employee, and Chief of Staff.
Each role is a folder of scheduled routines. The Sales Employee, for example, runs a prospect-follow-up routine on a weekday cadence, drafts the outreach, and then delivers a morning brief showing exactly what ran and what changed. Nothing sends until you review and approve it. Sending, publishing, and spending only happen when you explicitly release a channel or approve through the harness permission layer.
The whole system runs on your own computer, using whichever AI agent you already use: Claude Code, OpenCode, OpenClaw, Codex, and eight more are all supported. No hosted API, no per-seat pricing, no vendor to depend on. The MIT grant covers everything, including commercial use.
What sets this apart from generic AI automations is the brief model. Every routine shows its work in a plain morning summary. You are not handing over the wheel; you are reviewing a draft and choosing what ships.
Try this this week
- Go to github.com/markfulton/ai-employees and read the role descriptions
- Pick the one that covers your biggest weekly time drain: Social Media for content batching, Customer Satisfaction for review replies, Sales for follow-up emails
- Follow the install steps for the AI harness you already use (most take under 20 minutes)
- Let one routine run and read the morning brief it produces
- Approve, edit, or discard the draft; nothing publishes without your green light
The bigger picture
The usual framing around AI is about replacing people. This repo takes the opposite approach: it gives a one-person shop the leverage of a three-person shop without another salary or another SaaS subscription. Start with one role, get comfortable reading the briefs, and add a second only when the first is earning its keep. That's the same smallest-working-thing logic build9 brings to every project we ship for a small team in Ottawa.