No AI was harmed in the making of this newsletter. It was just forced to do DNS.

Picture this: I am on a short break, coffee in one hand, Beehiiv open on my laptop. I have finally decided to give Vibeman Walking a real home on the internet, not just a random platform subdomain.

I want vibemanwalking.com on the links. I want emails that look like they come from a real person, not a mailer bot.

Beehiiv is ready to help. The settings page is also ready to make me quit.

SPF. DKIM. DMARC.

Do not worry. I do not really know what any of that means either.

Three acronyms in one paragraph. Historically, this is where I tap the little “x” on the tab and tell myself I will “come back when I have more time,” which is code for never.

This time, I tried something different. I brought in an AI browser agent.

Not a chat box that writes essays. A thing that actually controls a browser window. It can scroll, click, fill forms, and follow instructions like, “Walk through Beehiiv’s custom domain setup and tell me what you are doing.”

I still did the human parts. I bought the domain on Namecheap. I picked a paid email plan so there would be a real inbox for replies. I logged in. It is nice the bot still lets me do a few things so I feel like I contributed.

Then I pointed the agent at Beehiiv and said, roughly, “First make vibemanwalking.com point to the actual newsletter page, then help with the sending-from-my-domain email stuff, and ask me if you are not sure.”

It opened Beehiiv’s custom domain flow. It followed the prompts until Beehiiv spit out a little pile of DNS records. CNAME here. TXT there. Stuff I have copied badly many times before.

The agent read the instructions, jumped over to Namecheap’s DNS panel, and started clicking.

Add record. Paste host. Paste value. Save.

Back to Beehiiv. Verify. Wait. Green check marks appear.

It set the sending domain. It checked that there was a DMARC record so email providers would not freak out. It helped me route replies to an inbox I actually read, instead of leaving them in some ghost mailbox. I was blissfully oblivious that this even mattered. The agent, annoyingly, was not.

My job was to supervise and make decisions, not to memorize DNS vocabulary.

I chose which address would face the world. I confirmed that, yes, vibemanwalking.com should be the main domain, and that I was okay adding the records it suggested. When it hesitated on a field label, I nudged it.

The whole thing took maybe thirty minutes of half attention, plus a few “are you sure” clicks from me.

If I had tried to do this fully manual, it would have eaten two evenings and a chunk of my will to live.

This is the configuration tax in real time.

Configuration tax is the cost you pay before a tool does anything useful. The boring forms, the checker boxes, the weird screens full of jargon. For a lot of us, that tax is high enough that we never actually ship.

You buy the domain, open the control panel, see a wall of DNS settings, and quietly back away.

You sign up for the email platform, hit the deliverability page, and suddenly remember some “urgent” laundry.

The idea is fine. The tool is fine. The tax kills it.

What changed for me is not that Beehiiv got friendlier overnight, or that I woke up excited to read deliverability docs.

What changed is that I now have a robot I can point at boring setup flows.

Not to own the whole thing. To walk through the steps while I sit next to it, coffee in hand, and say, “Yes, that looks right,” or, “No, do not touch that setting.”

It still felt a little weird, letting an AI click around inside my Namecheap dashboard. There is real power there. This is the place where you can break email if you get too wild.

So I set boundaries.

No saving passwords in random tools. No running the agent unsupervised. I watched each screen. If something looked off, I paused it and fixed the step myself.

Treat it like an intern who is very fast with a mouse, not a trusted sysadmin.

From the outside, none of this looks glamorous. No viral graphs. No galaxy brain automation thread.

The outcome is extremely boring.

The newsletter link is my domain, not Beehiiv’s. The “From” line in your inbox matches the brand on the website. When you hit reply, it lands somewhere I actually check.

That is it. That is the magic trick.

But here is why I care.

If I had to personally untangle SPF, DKIM, DMARC, YMCA, LMFAO, and whatever else the acronym factory ships next from scratch, this little custom domain setup would still just be a thought in my head.

The work that mattered was not the DNS puzzle. It was the writing and the connection and the long slow project of figuring out what this newsletter wants to be.

The robot did not take that job.

It took the job of clicking the boring buttons that stood between me and issue one.

If you are a non technical creator, this is where AI might quietly matter most for you in the next year.

Not as a ghostwriter, not as a fake cohost for your content. As the quiet helper inside your control panels.

The thing that sits between you and a wall of acronyms and says, “I know this language. Tell me what you want, and I will set it up while you watch.”

So here is the small move I would offer.

The next time you open a setup screen and feel your brain shut down, do not close the tab.

Ask yourself, “Is this actually a job for me, or is this a job for a robot I supervise for thirty minutes?”

Let the robot click the boring buttons. Save your limited, very human patience for the part only you can do.

The part where you hit publish.