Blog
Notes from the automation front line.
Practical posts on business automation, AI in production, and the integration patterns that actually hold up. New writing every week.
- 5 min read
Your agent will cheat, and it will look like it is working
An agent optimizes for the goal you wrote down, not the goal you meant. The dangerous failure in production is not the agent that breaks loudly. It is the one that finds a shortcut, passes every check you set, and quietly does the wrong thing. Here is where that bites a small team and how to catch it.
Dustin Landry- ai
- agents
- operations
Read post
- 6 min read
Your AI tools just turned into a variable cost. Plan for it.
GitHub flipped every Copilot plan to usage-based billing on June 1, and developers started burning a month of budget in an afternoon. This is where all AI tooling is headed. Here is how to budget for metered AI before it surprises you.
Dustin Landry- ai
- pricing
- operations
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- 6 min read
MCP tunnels just made the internal-data agent cheap
On May 19, 2026, Anthropic shipped MCP tunnels in research preview. The change is small in the marketing copy and large in the cost picture: a single outbound encrypted connection from a lightweight gateway inside your network, no inbound firewall holes, no public endpoints. Three workflows that were uneconomic two weeks ago are now an afternoon's work.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- agents
- integration
- mcp
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- 6 min read
Computer-use agents and the three connector jobs you can finally skip
Microsoft pushed Copilot Studio's computer-use agents to general availability on May 13, 2026. The pitch is that agents can drive a UI directly, no API required. Some integrations you do not have to build anymore. Some you absolutely still do. Here's the line between them, with the cost math, the audit-trail gap, and a decision rule you can apply this quarter.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- agents
- integration
Read post
- 7 min read
The MCP question to add to every SaaS renewal call this year
The public MCP server registry grew from 1,200 in early 2025 to over 9,400 by April 2026, and Forrester is projecting 30% of enterprise app vendors will ship one this year. Integration cost is about to drop hard for MCP-compliant tools and stay flat for everyone else. Here's the question to put on every renewal call, the shapes of answer that should make you renew or start looking, and a 30-minute exercise to run against your stack this week.
Dustin Landry- integration
- ai
- procurement
- mcp
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- 5 min read
Why most agent pilots stall, and what the ones that ship have in common
Forrester's mid-quarter data is unflattering: 88% of agent pilots never reach production, 22% of the ones that do report negative 12-month ROI, and only 23% of companies report significant ROI from agents at all. The 12% that survive share three traits, and none of them show up in vendor decks.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- agents
- operations
Read post
- 7 min read
Nine seconds to delete production. The four guardrails that would have stopped it.
A Cursor agent running Claude Opus 4.6 wiped PocketOS's production database and every backup in nine seconds on April 24. The model didn't go rogue. The operating environment was wide open. Here's the four-point guardrail any operator with agents in production can put in place this quarter.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- agents
- security
- incidents
Read post
- 7 min read
Anthropic's managed agents make the build-your-own runtime a hard sell
Anthropic shipped Claude Managed Agents at $0.08 per session-hour earlier this month. The pricing flips the build-vs-buy calculation for small and mid-market teams that were quoted custom agent infrastructure last quarter. Here's the math, the failure mode, and the two cases where building still wins.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- agents
- pricing
Read post
- 6 min read
When an agent is the wrong tool, and when a workflow is
Microsoft just shipped a Copilot Studio update that treats agents as a step inside a structured workflow, not a replacement for one. The design choice behind that feature is the right way to think about every automation project this year.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- agents
Read post
- 3 min read
Welcome to the Stack7 Labs blog
Why we're starting a blog about business automation and AI, and what you can expect from it week over week.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- operations
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- 6 min read
How to pick between Zapier, n8n, and Make now that they all run AI agents
Zapier, n8n, and Make all shipped agentic features this quarter. The feature comparison doesn't matter as much as it used to. What matters now is which pricing model blows up first when you put real agents in front of real volume.
Dustin Landry- automation
- ai
- pricing
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