I used to wonder why people spend so much on coding agents. Now I get it.
In the last 3 days, from my phone, using maybe 30% of my mental effort, I built this:
1. An automated book curation system
I talked through my reading criteria with a regular chat assistant until I landed on something I was happy with. Then I used a coding agent to turn that into a reusable skill that pulls free books from online libraries across English, Arabic, and French, scores each one against my personal criteria, and sends me only the best matches.
2. A home server out of years of disorganized files
I gave it access to an external disk and a set of sorting rules. It built a manifest mapping every old file to its new location, then I created a simple site to review and approve the changes before anything got deleted. On top of that, it set up a Nextcloud server so everything lives on my own home cloud now.
3. A fully configured e-reader
Fonts, dictionaries, firmware, version checks, all installed and verified without me having to learn any of it.
Now I have a full reading system I'm actually satisfied with.
You don't have to subscribe to these tools to build a million dollar company. Subscribing to make your life easier is enough.
Value doesn't always mean money. Sometimes it just means delegating tasks and building small tools for yourself that you'd otherwise pay for. Each of these things would have either cost me hours I don't have, or cost me money for software that does the same job. One subscription, a huge range of tools.