Can AI do tasks for me in software that has no API?

A lot of the software you depend on has no API, sometimes on purpose. Until recently that meant a person clicking through it by hand. Now an AI can drive the browser for you.

What did the manual version cost me?

Time I couldn't scale. In May I was making custom graduation songs for people and running Meta ads for them. I probably made about $500. Every order meant taking their email, writing the lyrics in Claude, pasting them into Suno, hitting play, downloading the song and sending it back. I couldn't automate it, because Suno doesn't have an API on purpose.

How does recording a workflow work?

Codex came out with a replay function. You tell it: I'm going to show you, in your in-app browser, how I do a multi-step workflow in this software. You show it once and give the workflow a name. From then on, any time you want it done, you say go do that workflow, here's the information.

"You're recording a process, not the facts. I don't write the same song every day."

I hate working with Stripe. I needed an invoice, so I said: make me an invoice, $1,400, here's the name of the business. Then I watched it on the screen go through the entire process and make the invoice.

Can an agent run the whole thing end to end?

That song workflow became my benchmark for agent tools. The full job: write the lyrics, description and title, then actually go to suno.com on a computer (ideally a dedicated Mac Mini), put everything in, hit Create, download the song and drop the link in chat.

One lighter agent app figured that out in 10 to 15 minutes, thumbnail included. It then turned the MP3 into a video and posted it to YouTube through Composio, in the right playlist, with a full description and all the links. About 30 minutes total to get it all working. When a heavier framework estimated 3 to 4 days for the same thing, without the YouTube thumbnail flow, I pushed back. That seemed crazy.

What about software I just don't know how to use?

This is where I use it most. Any website where I don't know what to do, like Stripe, my own software or n8n: the second my brain goes "I don't know what to do here," I stop, open the browser extension and ask it to go do it for me.

A publisher I worked with had spent weeks trying to fix the web version of her newsletter, which displayed way too wide. My advice: install Claude's Chrome extension, log in to Beehiiv, and tell it the public page is too wide, you think there's a bad setting, explore the settings, figure out why and fix it.

My software partner had a client document describing a workflow with at least 100 steps. Building it by hand in GoHighLevel would have taken a week or two. He asked Claude to turn the document into a real workflow and, by his account, it built the whole thing in about 15 minutes.

What if the AI hands the work back to you?

Refuse it. When AI gives you step-by-step instructions for something like pointing a domain at a site, don't follow them yourself. Tell it to do it, and jump in only when it can't. If a task is digital and not natural to you, don't even bother. That's how my own payment setup got configured: I told Codex to do it for me.

Even with standing instructions that say never ask me to do things you can do yourself, Claude still sometimes does 90% and tells me to go finish the rest in GitHub. I write back: no, I'm not going to do it, you figure it out. Usually it says I'm right, it can, and then it does. Don't take its word for what it can't do. It can do more than it tells you.