Define the job
One sentence for what the agent must do, what it must never do, and what success looks like. Scoped before a line of code — if the job is not clear enough to test, it is not ready to build.
Purpose-built agents that do one job well — connected to the systems you already run, tested on real inputs, and accountable for outcomes you can check. Not a chatbot demo. Not a generic wrapper.
One sentence for what the agent must do, what it must never do, and what success looks like. Scoped before a line of code — if the job is not clear enough to test, it is not ready to build.
The agent is built against your tools and data, exercised on real examples, and revised in the open. You see it fail early, on purpose, so it does not fail quietly in production.
Deploy with logging, guardrails, and a handover you can operate. An agent that nobody trusts is shelfware — the launch includes the checks that make it usable.
Agents usually run four to ten weeks depending on scope. You will know the calendar before you commit, and you will see progress weekly.
Maybe not — and you will be told so. If a simpler automation solves it, that is what gets recommended. Agents are for jobs where judgment at scale is the bottleneck.
The founder. Always. The person you brief is the person who designs the agent, writes the code, runs the tests, and ships it.