Should You Use an Agent for This?

The only question left

Five lessons ago, agents were a word you had heard too many times. You now know what one is (something that acts rather than answers), what it reaches with (tools, split into read and write), where it genuinely works, how it fails, and how to brief it.

All of that collapses into one practical question you will face on a Tuesday: should I hand this particular job to an agent, or should I just do it.

Here is the test. It takes about two minutes and it is worth running properly the first dozen times, until it becomes the thing you think automatically.

The five question test

Score 1 point for each YES.


VOLUME
Does this involve enough repetition that a person gets
bored and starts making careless mistakes?


RULES
Could I write down how to do it, well enough that a
competent stranger could follow it?


CHECKABLE
If it came back wrong, would I notice within minutes
rather than weeks?


REVERSIBLE
If it goes wrong, is the cost redoing the work rather
than an apology to a customer?


BOUNDED
Can I name exactly where it should look, and exactly
what it must not touch?

SCORE
5    Hand it over. Brief it properly and let it run.
3-4  Hand over the finding, keep the deciding. Drafts only.
1-2  Do it yourself, or use a chatbot to help you do it.
0    Do it yourself. This one is a judgement call in disguise.

Two tasks through the test

Almost every zero score task has a five score task hiding inside it. Look for the seam between the finding and the deciding, and hand over only the first half.

The first run protocol

Passing the test does not mean handing over the keys on day one. There is a sequence, and skipping it is how good tasks get a bad reputation.

RUN 1  Dry run. Ask it to describe exactly what it would do,
step by step, without doing any of it. Read that list.
Half the misunderstandings show up here.
RUN 2  Real run, small slice. Ten items, not four hundred.
Check every single one. Yes, all ten.
RUN 3  Real run, full size, read only or drafts only.
Spot check the first few items and the exceptions list.
RUN 4  Same again next week. If two clean runs in a row,
you can stop checking every item and start checking
the exceptions and a sample.
Never  Skip straight to run 4 because run 1 went well.

When someone else proposes an agent

You will not always be the one choosing. Sooner or later a colleague, a vendor or a slide deck will propose putting an agent somewhere in your process, and everyone in the room will nod because nobody wants to be the person who does not understand it.

You now have four questions that will make you the most useful person at that table, and none of them are technical.

What exactly would it be allowed to touch. Ask for the list, and ask which items on it are read and which are write. If nobody can produce that list, the proposal is not finished.

What happens if it gets this wrong. Not the elegant failure where it politely gives up, but the confident wrong turn where it does the whole job perfectly on top of a bad assumption.

Where does a person still sit in this. If the answer is nowhere, ask what the plan is for the day it quietly skips something.

How will we know it is working. If there is no way to check the output in minutes, you are buying trust rather than results.

Those four questions are not scepticism. They are the questions a good operations person asks about a new hire, a new supplier or a new process, applied to something that happens to be software.

Build your own list, off this site

This course cannot store anything for you. There are no accounts here and nothing you type is kept, which is deliberate and also means the useful artefact has to live somewhere you control: a note on your phone, a document, the back of an envelope you will not lose.

Copy the block below and fill it in this week.

THREE JOBS I DO EVERY WEEK THAT BORE ME

score:   /5
score:   /5
score:   /5
THE HIGHEST SCORING ONE
Goal (what is true when it is done):
Scope (where it may look):
Never (what it must not touch):
Stop and ask me if:
MY PERMANENT RULES, WHATEVER THE TASK

Nothing gets sent, published, paid or deleted without me
It tells me what it could not access or had to guess
New tasks start with a dry run
WHEN I WILL TRY THIS
Date:

Finish the quiz below and the Agent Aware badge is yours. More usefully, you can now sit in a meeting where somebody says we should get an agent to do that, and ask the question nobody else asks: what would it be allowed to touch, and what happens if it gets it wrong.