The Everyday AI Agent Team

Most writing about AI agents is aimed at people building software or chasing an audience. This series is not that. Each episode builds one agent that does something a normal person actually wants done, and publishes the exact prompt so you can run it yourself.

The first one is called Coupon. Its entire job is to stop money leaking out of your accounts.

Episode 1: Coupon, the money agent

Coupon runs in Grok Bot, xAI’s always-on agent product, which we picked for one reason: there is almost nothing to learn. You create a bot by clicking a plus sign, name it, and talk to it the way you would text a colleague. No workflow builder, no node graph.

Here is what Coupon was given to do:

• Audit subscriptions. Go through the inbox, find everything on a recurring charge, and cancel what is unused. It cancels through its own browser where that is possible, and drafts an email to the right person where it is not.
• Find discount codes on what stays.
• Flag software worth replacing. Look at what remains and identify candidates that could be built in-house instead of rented.
• Appraise and sell. Send it a photo of something you own and it prices it across Facebook Marketplace, eBay and Craigslist, then lists it for you if you say yes, images and all.
• Claim manufacturer rebates. Find product registrations in the inbox that qualify, then check monthly and file them.
• Remember warranties. Photograph the serial number and paperwork once, then forget it. Coupon pings you a week before expiry and asks whether the product needs replacing.
• Catch billing errors. Check daily for duplicate charges, unexpected increases and coding mistakes.
• Track gift-list prices daily, and ping only on a drop.
• Price-match automatically, on both purchases and memberships, with the request email drafted and ready.

The full prompt

This is the prompt as it was given, section by section, in the order it was entered. Paste the whole thing into a new bot in one go. Everything here becomes a permanent instruction, which is the point: you are not going to re-explain any of this later.

Hi Coupon, your role is implied by your name, which is to save me money.
I'm going to give you various capabilities and tasks to help me do this
both actively and passively.

Audit my emails and check for subscriptions so that we can go through them
together and then cancel if I choose. You handle it on your browser. If
there's no option to cancel online, I want you to draft a cancellation
email to send to the correct person for that product.

Whenever I upload pictures of items I own, appraise them and ask if I want
them to be listed for sale online. If I do, I want you to handle everything
from the listing creation to the image upload, and potentially advise me on
the negotiation too, if there is one.

When you do your initial audit of my emails, look for product registrations
that I can get a manufacturer rebate on. After this initial audit, check
once per month. For any rebate candidates that you find, I want you to send
in for that rebate.

Anytime I send you pictures of a product serial number with the picture of
warranty documentation, I want you to do two things. First is keep a record
for me in case I need to reference anything from that warranty. And the
second is I want you to ping me one week from the warranty expiration date,
letting me know that the warranty is due to expire, and asking me about the
condition of the product. If I want to utilize the warranty, you'll handle
that for me.

I want you to check once every day for new bills that come in and look for
any issues like duplicate billing, charges that seem higher than they should
be, potential code errors, etc. Ping me if you come across anything worth my
attention.

When I tell you about an item on my gift list, I want you to track each day
for price drops. I'll let you know if it's only sold on one website or if I
want you to do a general search for lowest pricing when you do your
comparison shopping. Only ping me when there's a price drop.

Another thing that I want you to do automatically is price matching. When
you see a product purchase bill in my inbox, find out if I could have gotten
a better deal somewhere else and if the place I bought it from would honor a
price matching request. Secondly, I want you to do this for any memberships
or services you see that have competitors that you can research and compare
the prices for. For example, if the gyms near the one that I attend offer
lower pricing, I want you to ping me and have a price matching request email
draft ready to go to be sent to the manager. Do this for any potential price
matching candidates when they come up.

Lastly, given my goal of saving money, I want you to think up and research
other ways that you can go about doing this for me. Look at the other tasks
that I've given you and use those as a starting point. Ask me any questions
and offer any recommendations you have that would make you even better as my
living coupon.

One capability is missing from that text on purpose. The instruction to flag software worth building in-house was set up separately, because it involves a second agent. That part is below.

What should you set up before pressing enter?

Most of this depends on email access, so connect Gmail first. In Grok Bot that lives under plugins, which is what other tools call connections. Install Gmail, then open the tools section and decide what the agent is allowed to do.

There is a toggle for sending messages on your behalf. Turn it off and Coupon writes drafts and stops, leaving you to read and send each one. Turn it on later, once it has earned it. Starting in draft-only mode costs nothing and is the sensible default for an agent that emails companies about your money.

The cancelling and the marketplace listings happen in the agent’s own browser, on its own virtual computer, reachable from the icon at the top right. That machine runs whether or not your laptop is open, which is what makes the daily checks work.

What happens when two agents talk to each other?

Coupon is not the only agent here. A second one, Builder, exists to build software. Coupon’s job is to spot subscriptions worth replacing and hand them over, not to build anything itself.

That handoff happened without a workflow being drawn. Coupon opened with “James asked me to flag software he pays for that we could build in-house. He’ll talk to you directly”, named its best candidate and a weaker one, and stopped there.

This matters beyond one exchange. When we wrote about AI agents talking to each other, we had to describe this behaviour as a vendor claim we had not checked. Now we have watched it happen: two agents, no connective setup, one passing work to the other and correctly declining to do that work itself.

Bigger organisations are doing the expensive version of this. A 2026 Retool survey of 817 of its customers and builders found 35% had already replaced at least one SaaS tool with something they built, and 78% expected to build more during the year. Read that number with the sample in mind: these are people already using a build-your-own-tools platform, surveyed by the company that sells it, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than a measurement of everyone. The small version is the same idea. Stop renting what you could own.

Does it actually save anything?

Two data points from the first run, one useful and one funny.

The arithmetic that makes this worth doing is unglamorous. A single membership price-matched at $30 a month is $360 a year, from one conversation you have once. Stack a few of those with some cancelled subscriptions and a discount code or two and you are into four figures annually without having done anything clever.

The Pokemon cards went differently. Roughly a hundred old cards, photographed and sent to Coupon, which priced them across the marketplaces and reported back a grand total of $125. The expectation had been rather higher. They are staying in the drawer another decade.

That second number is the useful one. The agent did the work correctly and the answer was disappointing, which is what an appraisal is for.

What Coupon cannot do for you

• It cannot decide which subscriptions matter to you. It surfaces the charges; whether the gym membership you never use is worth keeping for the week you start going again is your call.
• It cannot judge whether a price match is worth the awkward email. Sometimes $30 is not worth the relationship with a local business.
• It cannot be trusted unsupervised with sending until you have read a few of its drafts. Read them.

The rest of the series

Coupon is agent one. Builder has already appeared. Each new episode adds an agent to the team and its prompt lands on this page, so this is the only address worth bookmarking. Episodes to come are listed here as they publish.

• Episode 1: Coupon, the money agent. Above.

Common questions about building your own agent

Do I need to be technical?

No. The whole prompt above is plain English, and setting the bot up is clicking a plus sign and typing a name. If you can use a group chat you have the skills.

Is it safe to give an agent my inbox?

That is a real decision, not a formality. Start with sending switched off so it can only draft. Read what it writes for a week. Turn sending on when you have seen enough to predict what it will do, and keep it off entirely if the account holds anything sensitive.

Can I run this on a different tool?

The prompt is not specific to Grok Bot. Anything that can read your email, browse, and run on a schedule will take most of it. What you would lose elsewhere is the part where agents message each other without being wired together first.

What does it cost?

Grok Bot is included with SuperGrok and Cursor subscriptions and carries its own usage allowance separate from those plans. Check current pricing before committing, since it changes often and we do not republish figures we have not just verified.

What should I build first?

This one. Money is the easiest place to see whether an agent is doing anything real, because the result arrives as a number rather than a feeling. Once you have watched it cancel something you forgot you were paying for, the rest of the ideas come easily.

Sources

• Our own build and first run of the Coupon agent, August 2026. Prompt and figures are from that session.
• xAI — Introducing Grok Bot
• Retool — 2026 Build vs. Buy Report (817 respondents, all Retool customers and builders; read 31 August 2026)
• Our earlier Grok Bot review, tested on unrelated work

Read next

• Grok Bot, tested on real work
• When AI agents talk to each other
• Building an agent team in Cabinet
• AI agents versus chatbots
• AI side hustles worth trying
• How to use AI, from scratch
• The AI glossary