Finally got a chance to try out @replit Agent 4 last night (when I should have been sleeping according to my wife, lol). Atypical use case: dusted off a “passion project” I started over a year ago where I had envisioned using AI to “co-author” parts of a book I’ve been wanting to write for years, but again put on the shelf temporarily for other priorities because the tech wasn’t really ready. At the time ChatGPT was a struggle and gaslit & lied to me regularly (went back and found the chat logs; funny in retrospect as it was posting empty .zip files and claiming it had written multiple chapters, etc 🤦🏻♂️). AI was supposed to be my fact-checker, researcher, copy editor. Wasn’t anywhere close to being ready a year ago.
The overall project also involved building a pipeline for PDF/KDP publishing on Amazon; something I hadn’t even dreamt of using an AI agent for when I started, just used it for guidance on HOW to set it up was enough (but tedious).
Anyway, as you might well expect in about an hour I had a complete LaTeX based pipeline (essentially a git based CI/CD tool chain that publishes compliant and well-formatted content on-demand), linked table of contents, cross-referenced glossary/footnotes, new cover art, and a bunch of suggested edits to my content.
🤯—🤯
The OpenClaw agent “swarm” I was playing with as a way to help polish the writing? Unnecessary. (It quickly spun up 8(!) subagents and was done in a couple of minutes)
The local Docker Compose git/LaTeX/xelatex/pandoc pipeline? Deprecated. (Replit’s full stack turnkey approach gives me on-demand build and fully repeatable “workflow as code”)
Professional website landing page with prewired “Amazon preorder” & “purchase direct from author via Stripe integration” links? Done. (Integrated project allowed it to use content and context to one-shot the right marketing copy)
Total cost: $11.49
Put simply, Replit has taken away all my excuses. 😉🤣
More to come…