#automation
Every post tagged "automation".
36 posts · showing 1–10
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Your Inbox Agent Wakes Every 15 Minutes to Find Nothing. Cron or Event Trigger? Decide by What a Wasted Run Costs.
The trigger is the least-discussed design choice in a personal agent, and it quietly decides your bill, your duplicate rate and how stale its answers are. A simple test for choosing between a schedule and an event, and why the best setup usually uses both.
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Your Agent Asks Permission Nine Times an Hour, So Nobody Reads the Prompts Any More. Spend a Fixed Approval Budget.
Every confirmation dialog you add makes the next one less effective. Here's how to classify write actions by reversibility and reach, auto-allow the safe corner, and reserve the human's attention for the handful of actions that can't be undone.
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Your Agent Works in the Demo Because You're Watching: Six Failures That Only Appear at 3 A.M.
A live demo isn't a smaller version of production — it's a different environment with a human silently patching over every gap. Here are the six failure classes that only wake up once that human goes to bed.
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Your First Production Agent Should Be Invoice Reconciliation — Because the Ledger Grades It for You
The best first agent isn't the most impressive one — it's the one whose environment tells you when it's wrong. Here's how to score candidate tasks for a built-in oracle, and the two ways that oracle quietly lies to you.
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Agent or Just a Script? Count the Branches That Depend on Reading Something
There is a ten-minute test that settles whether your automation needs an agent loop or just a script with a couple of model calls in the middle — and the two ways of guessing wrong are not equally recoverable.
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Your Agents Asked 40 Questions This Week. Which Ones Should Have Reached a Human?
Human attention is the one resource in an agent deployment that never shows up on the bill — so agents spend it freely. Here's a three-way routing rule, a threshold you can actually tune, and the two metrics that tell you when your agent is asking too much or too little.
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Draining a Data Backlog: Should the Agent Batch Rows or Take Them One at a Time?
The ratio of preamble tokens to row tokens decides whether chunking a backlog saves an order of magnitude or nothing at all — and it's the alignment, retry amplification and blast radius that decide whether you should anyway.
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The Tool Returned 200 and Nothing Happened
A calendar agent reported success on a meeting that landed at 3am, on the wrong calendar, with no invitation sent. The API did exactly what it was asked — and the return value gave the agent no way to know.
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Extraction Was Never the Hard Part: An Invoice Agent, Rebuilt
The first version had the model read invoices and type the numbers. The rebuild started after the numbers were already read — which is where the actual work in accounts payable has always been.
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Should Your Agent Remember That, or Just Look It Up Again?
Two questions sort every fact an agent encounters into "write it down" or "fetch it fresh" — and getting the sort wrong is how an assistant ends up confidently quoting a meeting that moved last week.