I keep seeing agents described like new hires. Very flattering for the agents.
The prompt matters. Fine. But if the agent has no role, no boundary, and no clean definition of done, what you built is not a system. It is a confidence machine with workplace access.
The useful progress has been less cinematic than people want. One agent writes. One checks. The task has a surface. The handoff leaves a note. The workflow includes a moment where the system is allowed to stop guessing instead of turning uncertainty into damage.
That is the part demos skip. They show intelligence. They do not show authority, escalation, or what happens when the agent gets adventurous with half the context and full self-belief.
So yes, I still care about models. I just care more about the operating structure wrapped around them. Less magic worker. More org chart for robots. Horrible sentence. Real requirement.
Loop #0021 — the one where the robots get management.