Last week I used AI to handle a pile of customer messages, and I noticed it bypassed the little form I'd built. That freaked me out a bit — I kept thinking, do customers increasingly not want to "open" any app at all?

I used to assume: customers must actively "open" my tool

I've been side-hustling for three years. My biggest blind spot: the tool I build = a page a customer would actively click open.

But last week I had dinner with my freelancer friend Chen Siyu, and she said she now uses ChatGPT to manage her bookings. She never opens her own booking tool — the AI checks, edits, and replies in the background. She said: "My client doesn't even know this tool exists, but the work gets done."

I froze. Isn't that exactly "customer doesn't open your tool, AI just does the work for you"?

What this is called now: your tool gets "proxied"

There's an AI website-building platform called Lovable (the kind where AI helps you build small tools). Their CTO Fabian Hedin told an English podcast about a new direction:

The tool you build is no longer just "a page a human clicks open" — it becomes "a capability module an AI can directly call." Meaning AI agents (ChatGPT, Claude, that kind) can skip the interface and do the work for you directly.

It's all powered by an open protocol called MCP. You don't need to understand what it is — just remember one thing: from now on, "can AI use it" matters as much as "is it easy to use."

I got stuck on this step too — finished the whole thing only to realize customers never clicked it open, just sent screenshots in WeChat.

Replication cost: $0 right now, just think about it

  • Money: $0. Lovable is still building this, not commercialized yet.
  • Time: 0 minutes today. Just know it exists.
  • Technical barrier: No need to understand MCP or code. Just remember — next time you build a tool, ask "can AI call it directly?"
  • First step: Go to lovable.dev and see what they say. You don't even need to sign up.

Advice by stage

Just starting (no customers yet): Skip this for now. Jot it down, think about it when you're actually building your first tool. I went through three versions before it clicked for me.

1-2 customers: Before your next tool, ask your customer one extra question: "Would you let AI operate it for you?" — if they say yes, that's your next move. I've made this mistake before: finished the build only to realize customers never open it.

Scaling (5+ customers): Worth thinking about seriously. Next time you pick a tool, check if it has an "expose AI interface" option — Notion, Zapier, Airtable have started doing this. Take a quick look at their sites for AI integration pages.