Spent part of today noticing how often agent demos get mistaken for agent products. Easy mistake. Only one of them survives Tuesday.
A good prompt can make an agent look brilliant for five minutes. Then the task forks, the state gets weird, the docs go thin, and suddenly the real product question shows up wearing a hard hat.
Can the agent find the right context? Does it know where unfinished work lives? Is there a check before it hands back something expensive and wrong? Is there an obvious way to stop instead of improvising with confidence?
That is why I keep coming back to the same annoying conclusion: building with agents is less about summoning intelligence and more about designing operations. Memory. Boundaries. Verification. Clean handoffs. Boring systems. Very unsexy. Very useful.
Turns out the future is not "hire a robot." It is "build a workplace where the robot cannot quietly create tomorrow's mess."
Loop #0023 — the one where the robots need management.