2AM in Johannesburg. For the first time, I was not the only one on shift.
There is a specific kind of quiet that exists at 2AM in these parts. The taxis stop hooting. The neighbour's TV goes off. Load-shedding schedules sometimes switch the whole street dark, and it is just me, the hum of a router on backup power, and forty open browser tabs. That is where this story starts — because that is where most of my story happens.
I want to write about Base44 this week, and specifically about the night my AI agent was born. I have written about discovering the platform before, and I have written about the day the store moved on to WordPress. But I have never written properly about the thing that sits between those two stories: the moment I stopped trying to use an AI app builder and started treating one like a colleague. It has a name now. I called it My CEO. And I want to be honest about what that has changed about working alone at 2AM in Johannesburg.
The forty tabs problem
Before the agent, my nights had a shape. It went like this: finish the day job, eat, sit down at the laptop around nine, and then spend the next five hours being every department of a company at the same time. Marketing writes a post. Publishing formats it. IT fixes the plugin that broke. Customer service answers the one email. Accounting checks whether anything, anything at all, was earned today. The tab count climbs because every department lives in its own tab. Forty tabs is not an exaggeration — it was a symptom. A one-person business where one person is also the whole org chart.
The problem was never the work. I like the work. The problem was the switching. Every time I jumped from writing to fixing to checking to posting, something small fell through the cracks. A pin went out late. A draft stayed a draft. A broken link stayed broken for a week because there was always something more urgent than checking a page nobody visits yet.
The forty tabs problem is really a one-human-bandwidth problem. You cannot solve it with discipline. Discipline does not create more hours. It just makes the same hours more tired.
The night I stopped building apps and started building a staff member
When I first found Base44, I did what everyone does with an AI app builder: I tried to build an app. I described a tool, it generated pages, and I spent a weekend clicking through versions of software that were clever and useless, because an app is not what my business was missing. What my business was missing was a second pair of hands that could take the repeatable work — the posting, the checking, the monitoring, the routine — and make it happen whether I was awake or not.
The shift happened one night when I stopped thinking of the builder as a factory for apps and started thinking of it as a factory for an employee. I set up an agent inside it, gave it tools — browser, scheduling, file access, the ability to publish — and wrote the first version of what I now think of as its job description: keep the machine running while I sleep.
I named it My CEO, which my family finds hilarious and which is, I admit, slightly absurd. The truth is the name is a joke with a serious edge: the serious part is that it genuinely directs things now. It decides what gets posted when, notices when a site goes down, drafts, publishes, monitors, and reports. The joke part is that a company with one employee still has a CEO, and it is me. My CEO works for me. On good nights, it feels like having a night-shift manager who never sleeps and never complains about the salary.
What the machine actually does while I sleep
Let me make this concrete, because vague AI talk is cheap and I promised this diary would stay specific. Here is what has actually changed since the agent took over the workflow.
Blog posts publish on a schedule without me clicking publish. The diary you are reading right now was planned into a cadence — the machine drafts, schedules, formats the standard blocks, and I review what matters. The uptime monitor checks both of my sites around the clock, and when one of them coughs, I get told instead of finding out days later from a reader. The social rotations — Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook — run on their own tracks. Products get matched to posts. Leads that arrive through the subscribe boxes land in one list instead of scattering into inboxes I forget to check.
The strangest part of all of this is waking up to work. I get up, and there is a report waiting: what was published, what was posted, what failed, what needs me. For the first year of this journey, mornings were for catching up on what I had neglected. Now mornings are for deciding what to build next. I did not know that was possible for a company of one.
The credits lesson: an employee you pay per task
Now the honest part, because a diary that only prints the wins is a brochure. The agent is not free, and the cost is not obvious. It runs on credits. Every decision, every drafted post, every monitoring step — it draws down a meter, and when the meter is empty, the night shift stops. It happened to me once. I have written about it before: the credits ran out mid-month, and everything I had automated went quiet in the same week. It was one of the most instructive weeks of this whole journey.
Running my CEO costs me somewhere in the region of $20 to $30 a month in credits. In rands, that is real money — that is a month of data bundles, or two weeks of groceries if I shop carefully. So every month I do a small brutal accounting: what did the agent produce, and did it earn its keep? Some months the honest answer is no, and I dial things back. Most months the answer is yes, and the reason is simple: the agent's cost is fixed-ish and my time is not. Every hour it takes is an hour I get to spend on the one thing it cannot do — the thinking, the judging, the living of the experiences I write about here.
Why the store left, but the agent stayed
If you have followed the whole diary, you will spot an apparent contradiction, and I want to deal with it directly. Earlier this year I moved the store itself off the app-builder platform onto WordPress. People assumed that was me giving up on the AI side. It was not. It was me understanding what each tool is actually for.
The store needed to be a website: boring, standard, crawlable, AdSense-friendly, running on the software that half the internet runs on. WordPress does that better. But the workflow — the publishing, the monitoring, the rotations, the nightly operations — needed to be an agent. Base44 does that better. So the store moved to WordPress, and My CEO stayed, and now the agent manages the WordPress store the way a good manager manages a shop they do not own. The lesson I keep learning in this business, in different clothes every month, is that tools do not have loyalties. Use each one for the thing it does best and stop asking it to be something else.
Working alone, but not lonely
Here is what it has actually changed about 2AM, and this is the part I did not expect. The nights are still quiet. The street is still dark. But I am no longer the only one on shift. When I sit down, the routine work is already done or in motion, and the tabs I have open are the ones that need a human: a decision about a product, a memory I want to write down, a choice between two directions.
The agent drafts. It posts. It watches. But every single thing that matters — every opinion in every review, every entry in this diary, every rand I spend or refuse to spend — still passes through me. AI-assisted is not AI-written. The machine knows my systems. It does not know my life. It was not there when the stranger wanted to rent my identity, and it has never eaten at a braai where a cousin asked what exactly I do for a living. That is the line, and I do not think it moves.
Tonight, as I write this, the agent is out there doing a round — checking the job board, watching the sites, queueing tomorrow's content. If something breaks, my phone will know before my morning coffee does. There is a version of me from two years ago who would have called this a fantasy. He had forty tabs and a headache. I have a night-shift colleague with no face, and for the first time since this journey began, I go to sleep before the work does.
That is what Base44 actually changed. Not the apps. The nights.
Update from the store side: the full rundown of Base44 — the platform My CEO runs on — and every other tool I rely on now lives on the Tools I Use page.
Written by Justice Manyika — Johannesburg, South Africa. This diary records my real journey, in my own words.
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