I run WP Mantis and am currently working on several new projects, including MantisZero, FormOasis, Lead Gen Zoo, and Gravity Ranger.
Each one has its own inbox. Its own support load. Its own content to keep up with.
For a while I kept up by working more. That works until it doesn’t.
Email kept growing. Support kept growing. Content kept piling up. What I really needed was a project manager who never sleeps.
So I built one. It’s called Grokbot.
Here’s the thing, though. Grokbot isn’t one big assistant. It’s a team of bots, and each one has its own job.
That decision didn’t come from AI. It came from years of managing projects with real people.
What Managing Freelancers Taught Me
Before any of this, I spent years managing projects the old fashioned way.
Clients on one side. Freelancers on the other. Me in the middle, keeping the work moving and making sure what got built was what the client actually asked for.
If you’ve done that job, you know where projects fall apart. It’s almost never talent.
It’s the brief.
Give a good developer a fuzzy job and you get fuzzy work back. Give one person five different jobs and every one of them gets done halfway. Skip the review step and you find the problem after the client does.
The projects that went well had the same things in common:
- Every person had one clear role.
- Every role had written expectations.
- Repeating work ran on a schedule, not on memory.
- Nothing shipped to the client until someone checked it.
That’s not an AI framework. That’s just project management.
And it turns out it’s exactly how you get AI to do useful work.
The Team
Let me walk you through who’s on it.
The main bot is the front door. Every request goes to it first. It doesn’t try to do everything. It figures out which specialist owns the job and hands it off.
That’s the project manager role. Take the request, route it to the right person, keep the specialists focused.
From there, the specialists:
- X Bot runs my @chrisegg account. It writes about 11 posts a day, sends me a preview every night at 8 PM, and reviews my notifications.
- Inbox Triage sorts my email, surfaces what’s urgent, drafts replies, and flags newsletter items worth sharing.
- Mantis Support works the [email protected] inbox for my businesses.
- Slack Desk handles my Slack.
- Focus Bot reviews my GitHub issues several times a day and keeps me on track.
- Ranger Newsletter drafts the weekly Gravity Ranger newsletter in SendFox.
Seven bots. Seven jobs. No overlap.
When something goes wrong, I know exactly whose job it was. Same as with a real team.
The Content Engine for X
X Bot is the busiest one on the team, so it’s worth a closer look.
Posts cover a range of topics. WordPress and development. Business. Building in public. Bug fixes. Faith.
Bug fixes go out as changelog style posts that link to the actual GitHub pull request. That’s building in public with receipts.
Every day there’s one faith post. It pulls a verse from that week’s lesson and adds my take on it.
It also shares other people’s work. I picked a handful of YouTube channels I actually learn from: Alex Hormozi, Myron Golden, Rob Walling, and a few others. The bot watches those channels, pulls the transcripts, and writes my take with a real link back to the video.
Voice Rules Are the Brief
This is where the freelancer lessons really paid off.
Early on with any new writer, the first drafts never sound right. Not because they’re bad. Because they don’t know you yet.
The fix was always the same. Write it down.
So X Bot has written voice rules:
- Use concrete examples.
- No hashtags.
- No em dashes.
- No invented facts.
- Never two posts on the same idea in one day.
Every time a post misses, I don’t just fix the post. I fix the rule.
That’s the difference between editing work and managing a process. One fixes today. The other fixes every day after it.
A Newsletter With Almost No Effort
The Gravity Ranger newsletter used to be one of those things I meant to do every week.
Now it just happens.
Every Monday, Ranger Newsletter pulls the new Gravity Ranger posts, add-ons, and classes.
Each issue stays small on purpose. One add-on, two posts, one highlight.
Anything left over goes into a backlog. So the newsletter never runs out of material, and a busy week doesn’t turn into a giant issue nobody reads.
It loads each issue into SendFox as a draft.
And then I press Send myself.
The Guardrails
Every good project has a scope. Every good team has rules about what they can and can’t touch.
Here are mine:
Nothing goes out under my name without my approval. The bots draft. I send. Every time.
They only touch my personal GitHub account. Never the organizations I belong to. Those aren’t mine to hand over.
API keys are stored as secrets. They never show up in chat or in code.
If you’ve ever given a freelancer admin access to a client’s site, you know why these matter. Access should match the job. Nothing more.
How It Fits My Dev Workflow
The bots aren’t a separate world. They sit inside how I already work.
I plan and write in Claude. I build in Cursor. I develop locally in WordPress Studio and push to the live sites from there.
All my projects are tracked on my Chris HQ board on GitHub. That’s where Focus Bot looks when it checks in on me through the day.
Same idea as a project board with a real team. One place where the work lives, so everyone, human or bot, is looking at the same thing.
The Wrap Up
None of this needed new management ideas. The old ones work fine. They just work faster now.
The short version of what I’ve learned:
- Give each bot one narrow job. A bot that does everything does nothing well. Same with people.
- Write down your voice rules and keep tightening them. The brief is the product.
- Set up routines for anything that repeats. If you do it every week, it should run every week without you remembering.
- Keep a human on the Send button. The bots draft. You decide.
If you’ve ever managed a project, you already have the skills to build something like this.
You’ve just been using them on people.
What would you hand off first? Let me know.