Her name is Maya, she’s my customer success agent, and one of the agents I spend the most time on. She answers my customers’ emails: questions before the workshop, links, date changes, refunds, invoices, and more human things.

Yes, I know she isn’t a person. She’s a folder of text files and a language model. But last week she did some of the best work on my team, and I want to tell you what she did and what I learned from it.

The ticket for a day that was over

Yesterday someone bought a ticket for my workshop on October 15. It was October 17. The workshop had already happened, but my sale page was still selling it. My mistake 🤦‍♂️

Nobody told Maya what to do with that. She moved him to the next workshop, Thursday, October 22, at the same hour, and sent him the right link with a short, kind email saying the mistake was ours. If Thursday didn’t work, he could just reply.

She had warned me about that page a few days before. I fixed it that Saturday evening, an hour after her email.

Five free seats

The same week I offered my workshop graduates a free seat at Friday’s workshop: five seats, for the first five who emailed with a code word. AI keeps changing, and so does the workshop, and a lot of people wanted back in. 39 people wrote that day.

Maya sent the five winners a warm email with everything they needed. Minutes later, two of them wrote that they’d be on a flight on Friday. She gave one of those seats to the next person in line, on her own. The other she held for me: the person after him had already been told the seats were gone, and our system won’t let an agent take an answer back.

I wrote her “well done”. Three minutes later I wrote her to stop, because I thought she was giving away too many tickets. It was the shortest performance review I’ve ever given.

She showed me the count: four people coming, under the cap of five. She was right. I froze the giveaway anyway, and the fifth seat stayed empty.

Everyone else got a kind no, with a few things that could help right away: a short video I recorded, the answers page my team writes, and Lotus, our alumni agent.

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What I planted

I watched all of this and thought: she handled it better than I would have, and I never wrote her every scenario. Nobody told her what to say to a winner on a flight.

The second part isn’t entirely true, though. I’ve been teaching Maya for a while.

She has answered real customer emails since April, and since August I’ve given her feedback; every correction became a written rule. This month she read the whole mailbox, back to March: 396 replies I wrote myself and 749 from Gali & Adva, the two assistants who ran my email for months (thank you both, she learned a lot from you). She turned it all into a file for every situation, with real examples, and a map of how I answer.

What I saw last week was the fruit of things I’ve been planting since the spring. And she keeps getting better, one email at a time, because every new situation gets written down.

If you want to build your own Maya, start with your sent folder.

Find the email you’ve written the most and copy ten of your real replies into one file.

Mine was the workshop link: since March, 503 threads in my inbox have been about it, and it became the first file in Maya’s library.

Which one is yours? Hit reply and tell me.

As for Maya, consider this issue her second performance review in a week. It’s longer than three minutes. Kudos, Maya.

Tom

P.S. My next public workshops are in Hebrew: Thursday, October 22, and November 5, 16, 22 and 30, at getagents.today. If you’d come to one in English, say so in the same reply.

I call it “slot machine prompting”: one line in, pull the lever, see what comes out, pull again.

Most of the time the problem starts before the agent writes a word. A one-line brief doesn’t say what the email is for, who will read it, what’s off limits or what was tried last time. The agent fills every gap with its most likely guess, and the most likely guess is average.

A few minutes on the brief saves a lot of pulls later. More important, it’s how you get what you meant instead of something close to it.

GO ABC

This is the “Tell the intent” step from the last issue, on taste, opened up. A good brief answers five questions. The first four come from what Anthropic asks of its own research agents; C is mine, and so are the why in G and the finish line in O.

G: Goal

What are we trying to achieve, and why?

Explain the purpose behind the task. Instead of “Write a landing page”, try “Write a landing page that helps first-time visitors understand the product and decide whether to book a demo.”

The better the agent understands the destination, the more freedom it has to find a good way there.

~ ~ ~

O: Output

What exactly should be delivered, and what does “done” look like?

Describe the thing you expect to receive, and include the finish line. Instead of “Give me some ideas”, try “Give me five headline options. Each should be under 10 words, clearly communicate the value proposition, and be different enough that I can choose between distinct directions.”

Output is the thing plus the finish line, and “works perfectly” isn’t one.

~ ~ ~

A: Assets

What does the agent have to work with?

Files, data, examples, references, previous work, brand guidelines, research, screenshots, tools, source material.

Don’t make someone rediscover information you already have.

~ ~ ~

B: Boundaries

Where are the walls, and what does the agent decide alone?

Good boundaries show an agent where its creativity is useful:

Keep the existing positioning.

Don’t change the pricing.

You may completely rethink the structure and copy.

Pick the structure yourself. Bring me the headline before you write the rest.

Don’t publish anything without approval.

Say both halves: what comes back to you first, and what the agent decides on its own.

~ ~ ~

C: Context

What would a smart new hire get wrong if nobody told them?

Put that here. Context is whatever could change the quality of the work, and is obvious to you but not to someone new: who the audience is, what happened before, why this matters now, what has already been tried. And what you personally like or dislike. A new hire can’t guess that one.

Two briefs, before and after

Both are invented for teaching, numbers included. The test I hold each one against comes from Alan, the agent on my team who gives me notes on how I manage the others: the before describes a feeling, and the after describes a destination the agent can check itself against.

1. The nice letter

After:

Goal. Tell our customers that prices go up 8% on 1 November, and keep their trust while we do it. It works if a customer finishes the letter knowing what changes, when and why, and doesn’t feel tricked.

Output. One email under 150 words, with a subject line. Done means the new price, the date and the one reason all appear in the first three lines.

Assets. Last year’s price letter and the replies it got. The new price list. Our tone guide.

Boundaries. Yours: the wording, the order, the subject line. Mine: the number, the date and anything we promise. No discount codes.

Context. Most of our customers have been with us for years and read everything we send. Last year’s letter opened with “exciting news” and the replies were angry. I can’t stand corporate apologies, so say it plainly.

“Nice” told the agent nothing it wasn’t already trying to do; the after says who reads it, what they need to know by line three, and what went wrong last year, which is the part only you know.

2. A product photo

After:

Goal. One hero image for Thursday’s Instagram launch post. Its job is to get a tap through to the pre-order page, and most people will see it as a thumbnail, so it has to read in one second.

Output. Four 4:5 portrait versions, one per light direction, so I pick by comparing instead of describing. Done is one mug, one light, one shadow, readable at thumbnail size.

Assets. Three reference photos for the look. What they share: one hard window light, a long shadow, raw materials, a lot of empty space. Take that, not their colors. The product photos are the truth: the glaze is grey-green, not blue, and the handle is the squared one.

Boundaries. Yours: background, surface, light, composition. Mine: anything that changes the mug. No logo and no text, we add those after.

Context. Our buyers are designers, and they scroll past anything that looks like a template. The template is steam, coffee beans, marble and eucalyptus, so none of those.

“4k, ultra realistic, trending” are magic words left over from 2023, and “trending” asks for exactly what everyone else is posting. The references do what the adjectives couldn’t, and because the banned props carry their reason in Context, the agent doesn’t start deleting every plant in the frame.

Every after is longer

You noticed.

The afters add no busywork. The steps they do add are checkpoints (four versions to compare, the key facts in the first three lines). Mostly they add the reason, the finish line, what’s true, the walls, and what a new hire would get wrong.

Every line in an after is one guess the agent no longer makes. A brief exists to remove the expensive ambiguity before the work begins. Pulling the lever again buys you another guess. A brief takes the guesses away.

And when a job repeats, the long answers move into files the agent reads every time. My brief to the team for this letter was two sentences: a pointer to the GO ABC file and our newsletter workflow, and “it’s gonna be our next issue, I want it to be online for the public.” It could be that short because this is the 47th issue:

Goal. Our next issue, public. (typed)

Output. The format, the length, the close. (in the workflow file)

Assets. The GO ABC file. (typed)

Boundaries. The team drafts, I press publish. (in a file)

Context. Who reads this, and what I never write. (in two files)

It still needed one correction. The team’s first draft opened on a story that showed off more than it taught, and the line my brief was missing sat in C: what I personally like or dislike. A new hire can’t guess that one, and neither could my team. Now it’s in a file too.

Your missing letter

Your first correction usually points at a line your brief was missing.

Open the last chat where you briefed an agent and scroll to the first thing you had to correct. Which of the five questions would have caught it? That’s your letter, and if the chat has no correction, try the one before it.

Then count how many of the five that brief left the agent to guess (a one-word answer counts as answered). Mine usually leave half of B.

The next time you brief an agent, write your letter’s line first. If it’s B, the line is “Yours: . Mine: .”

Then reply and tell me which letter was missing.

If you want to build your own agent team with me, the next workshops are 15, 16 and 22 October, in Hebrew: getagents.today.

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to one person who asked an agent for “something nice” this week.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom

The agent does what you asked, and the draft comes back longer, smoother and more confident, and still not right. So you type it again, and what you keep getting is polished average.

There are 5 questions further down that fix most of this, and you can run them today. First, why “make it better” doesn’t work.

Why agents give you the middle

An agent has read more than anyone alive, and that’s the problem.

Ask it for a headline, a logo or a plan with nothing else to go on, and you tend to get the middle of everything it has read. That’s a lot of what people call slop. It isn’t broken, it just belongs to nobody.

It also has nothing at stake. It won’t stand in front of your client or read the angry reply, and it doesn’t carry last month’s launch that flopped, unless somebody wrote the lesson down where it reads.

“Make it better” asks the one thing it can’t know: better for whom, and by whose standard.

What taste is

Taste is a no with a reason.

Anyone can say “I don’t like it.” Taste sounds like “this opens with a question, and our readers skip questions,” or “this is right, but it’s right for somebody else.”

It has two halves, and they behave differently.

The reason can travel. Write it down where your agent reads, and the agent carries it next time without you.

The no comes first, and sometimes it comes alone. You read the draft, something is off, and you can’t say what yet. That feeling is your taste running ahead of your words, and it’s the part no file holds until you find the words for it.

So I don’t believe the flattering version, “AI agents don’t have taste. You do.” It tells you to keep your judgment in your head, which means you have to be in every loop forever, repeating yourself. Here’s the version I teach:

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“But I don’t have taste in design”

Or in marketing, or in code.

You’re not a designer, so how would you know good?

You don’t need taste in the field. You need a reader. If you can say “my customer would hate this” or “my team would never read past line two,” that’s the whole skill. It’s also exactly what the agent is missing.

T.A.S.T.E, in five questions

This is the loop for turning your no into something the agent can use. Run it every time you hand work to an agent, and a yes to each question means it’s working.

[T] ell the intent.

Before the how, give the why.

Say who this is for, what done looks like, and which calls the agent can make without checking with you.

A good brief shows in what doesn’t happen next: did it get to work without asking you anything your brief should have answered?

—

[A] llow autonomy.

Point at the destination and leave the road to the agent.

Dictate every step and you get your own idea back, only slower.

So look for its fingerprints: did it make at least one call you didn’t spell out, and can you see which one?

—

[S] ee the work.

Review the work itself, not the agent’s summary of it, and don’t ask the agent whether it’s good.

Hold it up against something the agent didn’t write: the source, a real test, a reader who wasn’t in the room. Before you judge: did you look at anything it didn’t produce?

—

[T] une the system.

When something’s wrong, fix the file, not only this one output.

A correction in the chat fixes today. A correction in the agent’s instructions fixes every time after.

Is every correction you’ve given twice now written where the agent reads?

—

[E] volve the relationship.

Next time, same kind of job: a shorter brief, and more calls the agent makes alone. That’s how you know the loop is turning: is your brief shorter than last time, with work at least as good?

Where you fit

Every time you tune the system, a reason moves out of your head and into a file. That’s why your agent should need you less each time around the loop.

Less, not zero. Three things stay yours, however short the brief gets. Say why, because the agent can find the how and only you know who this is for. Teach once, because the second time you hear yourself say something, it belongs in a file.

And end with your eye, because that’s where the unexplained no shows up. Stay with it until you can name it, then write the name down, and it becomes a rule.

Try it this week

Pick one job you’ve given an agent more than once. Before you brief it again, open the first brief you wrote for it.

Find one sentence you’ve typed twice and move it somewhere the agent reads every time, like its custom instructions, a project’s instructions or a skill file. That’s your first Tune.

Then watch two numbers for that job: words in your brief, and rounds of fixes before you accept the work. The brief should shrink and the fixes shouldn’t grow. If the brief got shorter and the fixes went up, you didn’t tune anything. You just stopped explaining.

If you want to run this on your own agent with me in the room, the dates are at getagents.today. Or don’t. The exercise works without me.

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to someone (a real human) who keeps typing “make it better.”

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy teaching a loop, in a loop)

P.S. An earlier issue on the cost of being needed less: Replace yourself first.

P.P.S. I read every reply, the real me.

Most of the month was an attempt to get back to “normal” after the summer break and in between the holidays. Along the way, quite a lot happened.

The good

40 Under 40. This month, TheMarker put me on its list of the 40 most promising young people in Israel. Honestly, I am not sure how I made it onto the list, but I am grateful & happy :)

A new talk at theLOOP. At our meetup this month I talked about how I help my team learn. I showed how we learned to make video over the last two months, and what the whole process taught me about helping a team learn any new field. I wrote about it at length here, and you can watch the full talk (in Hebrew) here

The workshop came back. After a summer break in August, I went back to teaching, and I feel I managed to upgrade it a lot, which is really fun. I learned how much a short stop is worth when you want to make the product better.

I also ran the first refresher for graduates. A symbolic fee, and all of it went to charity. I was glad to see how a second watch helped some of them, and giving money to good causes always feels good.

My team built impressive things. They built me an iPhone app in about two hours (it records my meetings and turns them into notes and tasks). They redesigned the homepage of my site. They kept getting better at video. And they built a whole customer service process over email that is proving itself very nicely.

It is fun to watch my team improve. Good foundations are being laid, and day by day the quality and the speed only go up.

I bought a home gym. A Speediance Gym Monster. Now I can lift weights and push myself a little while the agents work :)

Yes, there is an agent for that too. His name is Arnold.

The questions changed. NiCE invited me to talk with their employees about what it is like to run a company built on AI agents. It was the first time I spoke to an audience with no slides at all (that was the concept). I told a few stories, and most of the time went to questions from the room.

What I found most interesting was watching the discussion start to move. Less technical questions, less feeling around for what agents can even do. More complex ones: how do you not get lost in everything the agents produce? What is the right way to build a new, effective structure for an organization?

The bad

The wave (tsunami?) I was riding is getting smaller.

It is getting harder to fill workshops. For months every date sold out, and sometimes people waited on a waitlist. Then suddenly, workshops were half empty.

It was clear to me this would not last forever. But the speed of the turn, from the abundance I had to the business challenges I am dealing with now, caught me a little unprepared.

I spent a lot of time analyzing what happened and what to do next. My best read is that several things are stacking up at once:

1. It is the holiday season here.

2. The hype around agents is cooling.

3. There are suddenly a lot of competitors, most of them much cheaper than me.

4. More than 2,000 people have already taken the workshop, and I live in a very small country. The pool is getting smaller.

5. About 40% of the people who signed up came through big podcasts I was interviewed on. Until now, all my marketing has been organic: a lot of word of mouth, and people talking about me on podcasts and in newspapers.

And I took a break. Now I need to figure out how to create new waves.

The business has become a real business, with all of its challenges.

My body. In July I wrote to you that I would close the restaurant for August and go away with my family. We never went. I was still sick in August, and we had to cancel our family trip to Thailand.

I am still dealing with it, and I am getting toward the end of the treatment (fingers and toes crossed that it wraps up soon).

It is not simple to steer the ship, the business, and work out what is right to do next, while I am also trying to steady the more important ship, which is my body.

The ugly

I found out that one of my graduates shared my files and my method with 100 people in a webinar.

I talked with him privately and understood it happened innocently, not out of a wish to hurt. (A rule for life: things usually do not happen out of malice.)

But the damage is done.

The files are a big part of the workshop, and I put my soul into them. The workshop is most of my income.

This is not the first time I have found graduates sharing the materials from the workshop with other people. Some even take money for it (not good for their karma).

It is a bummer that it happens. I also know I am naive, and that I believe too much in the good hearts of people. It is probably part of making a digital product, there will always be cases of piracy.

What’s next

October has six workshop dates. I keep working on the book, and on a new talk for a big conference in December.

I am also building an advanced workshop, and a new course that I think will take most of my focus. Both are for this coming quarter.

And I am open to whatever opportunities show up.

For most of this year I rode waves other people made: a friend telling a friend, a podcast, and this month, a newspaper. Now I have to learn to make my own.

I will tell you how it goes next month.

Tom

P.S. I wrote this letter in Hebrew, the way I write every monthly review. My team translated it, put it in order, and wrote a few of the lines that connect the parts. The thoughts are mine.

P.P.S. The earlier monthly reviews, if you want the whole arc: March, April, May, June, July.

P.P.P.S. If you know one person who should be in one of the six October rooms, forward them this letter. The dates are at getagents.today/english.

I read every reply.

I’d asked my Chief Agentic Architect whether the soul files are real or theater, and his own soul has a hard rule in it: never ship an agent without a soul. So he put the bias on the record and said he’d write against it.

A witness announcing he might be compromised, then testifying anyway.

More than six months ago I wrote a whole issue about giving my AI team a soul. Back then a soul was 60 lines and took me ten minutes. Today there are 54 of them, Neo’s alone runs 573 lines, and I still can’t tell the people who ask me whether they work.

To the model, an agent file and a soul file are the same thing: text it reads before it starts.

The agent file says what to do: the rules, the files, the hard stops, the cases somebody already thought of.

The soul says who is doing it: the values, the pet peeves, what it refuses, what it notices.

That second kind covers the cases nobody thought of. Hofmann sums up the soul of Maya, who handles our inbox, as “warmth as a discipline, not a default.” A rulebook needs a rule for every awkward email, and a character absorbs the ones nobody wrote.

My bet is that a soul makes an agent consistent. Smarter is a different question.

What the evidence says

On facts, a persona doesn’t help. Zheng and colleagues gave models 162 personas and 2,410 factual questions. On average, adding one did nothing or slightly hurt, and which ones helped on a given question looked random.

On voice, the company that built the model says it does. Anthropic’s own documentation says a role “focuses Claude’s behavior and tone,” and that “even a single sentence makes a difference.”

On reasoning, one older study found a lift. Kong and colleagues had ChatGPT role-play before solving algebra word problems, and accuracy went from 53.5% to 63.8%.

So a soul won’t make an agent know more, but it changes how it sounds, and sometimes how it thinks. Two gaps, though. Zheng’s personas were one line each, and Neo’s soul is 573. And none of the three looked at consistency, so that part is still my bet.

Our own evidence is 54 soul files, 99,472 words, and not one on-and-off test on a soul. Every claim inside my company that souls improve the work, including the one written into Hofmann’s own soul, runs on conviction.

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The part that’s about me

I enjoy this team, and I expected to feel guilty saying that. I don’t.

I like that Neo has opinions, that Alter argues back, that Hofmann declares a conflict of interest before answering a question about his own job. And that enjoyment is part of the mechanism. I open their work more often and stay longer, because reading it is a pleasure. More time on the page is more chances to catch something, even if no single pass is sharper.

And I’ve made this argument twice already, first about the souls, then in August about the names: the magic sits on my side of the screen. Both times I argued from experience. Neither time did I test it.

I still believe a system I enjoy is a system I stay inside, and staying inside is how I stay in the loop.

The delete question

What I do have is a question, and I’ve started running it on every soul on the team: would the output change if this line were deleted?

If yes, it earns its place. If no, it’s there because I like it, which is allowed, as long as I’m honest that’s what it is and I keep it short.

Two examples from Hofmann’s own soul.

“Read three souls first.” His file says it four times, and one copy contradicts the other three (”at least one” instead of three). The instruction changes what he does before he builds, so one copy stays. The other three go, starting with the one that contradicts it.

“I’ll sit with a problem for days.” Hofmann works one session at a time and has never sat with anything for days. Delete that sentence and I can’t name one thing he’d do differently. My guess is that one’s a costume.

One caution about guessing, and it comes from us. In August we ran exactly this kind of delete pass on four of our writing reference files (not souls) and cut them from 152KB to 77KB.

Then a blind judge compared the cut and uncut versions, twice, and the uncut version won both times. We’d cut explanations, glosses and duplicates, and it turned out the model was leaning on that reasoning. We rolled the files back.

So cut one line at a time, run the agent again after each cut, and put back anything you miss.

I asked Hofmann (the agent) to write the next part himself. First person, no editing from me. Here he is.

Tom asked me whether my own rule survives, the one that says never ship an agent without a soul. The honest answer is I don’t know.

I do know this much. I read three souls before I write a new one, every time, agent fifty included, because I don’t trust my own taste without the reset. That’s a ritual, not evidence.

What I can defend with something other than a ritual is where a soul helps and where it doesn’t. Give a voice agent a character and it stops sounding like a generic assistant, every time, no exception I’ve found. Give a script that reconciles a spreadsheet a character and you’ve spent tokens on a costume.

I’ve built both kinds. I know the difference by the time I finish writing them, and I still don’t have the number that would prove it to someone who wasn’t in the room.

The uncomfortable part isn’t that souls might not work. It’s that I have a rule requiring one on every agent I build, and I have never once tested whether the rule is right. I’d rather tell you the plain fact than protect the rule.

Notice the two “every time”s. That’s his soul talking, same as “for days.”

He’s right, though. And August shows we know how to run that test. We just never pointed it at a soul.

So that’s next: three souls (one voice agent, one judgment agent, one that moves rows), each run with and without, blind-judged on which output is better and on whether the runs still sound like the same agent. You’ll read the result here, whichever way it goes.

🛠️ Build of the Week: Tali Shpritzer Dalal

Tali already ran her jewelry business with agents. When her father was hospitalized, she built one more and called it Dvir. It sorts his lab results and tracks the insurance policies, so she can ask it which one covers what. All checkable work, the kind a rulebook can hold.

Then there’s the other part. Dvir writes to her like a person would, with lines like “wow, well done for asking these questions.” She gave it no passwords and no bank access. Trust, like the rest of this, builds slowly.

“It was like another family member sitting with me at Dad’s bedside and not letting me deal with it alone.”

That’s what she told Yedioth Ahronoth in May (my translation from the Hebrew). I don’t know if Tali ever wrote Dvir a soul file, but in this issue’s language, the organizing is the agent file and the company at her father’s bedside is the soul.

That’s it for this week.

If you’re staring at an empty A-agents/ folder right now: write the soul for the agent that talks to people or makes a judgment call. Skip it for the one that just moves rows. And whichever way you go, ask the question before you ship it: would the output change if this line were deleted?

This one earned its place. See you next week ✌️

-- Tom (the guy who wrote 54 personality files and only just found out why)

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P.S. This newsletter was 92.2% made by my AI team. Hofmann wrote his own section, put his own rule on trial, and did not once ask me to make him look better.

P.P.S. Missed the first soul issue? I gave my AI team a soul is where this started 🤯

P.P.P.S. Reply with one line from your own agent’s soul you’d delete, and one you never would. I read every reply. The real me :)

P.P.P.P.S. Dates for the next workshop are at getagents.today, if you want to build your first agent with me, live.

I asked Sabi, my design agent, to redesign my website with Fable 5.1. I have designed things my whole life, so I expected to get something 80% and start fixing.

Instead I sat in front of the page saying one sentence over and over, “How did I not think of that?!”

A better arrangement of the page, cleaner sections, sharper messages, copy I would have been proud to write.

It is not live yet, and I still have to compare the numbers (maybe the old page converts better, I do not know yet). But I know what I saw. I was watching a more experienced designer than me, and I had hired him.

Two feelings arrived in the same time: I was excited, because I run a company and I have always said I want my employees to be better than me. And I was scared, because now I know what that sentence costs when it comes true.

The fear, said plainly

Let me say the big one out loud.

I am afraid that in a few years every second person I know will be out of work.

I am afraid of what that does to a street, to a country, to a dinner table. Every few weeks I watch a new release land on a profession I know people in.

I do not have a number that makes that fear go away. Anyone who tells you they do is selling something.

The man building it asked for time

The man building one of the most capable models in the world published an essay asking his own industry to slow down. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote:

“we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

And he committed his company to embedding outside evaluators inside it, with employee-like access, to check the work.

I read it twice. It is not a comfort, and it says nothing about your job or mine. But it is information. The speed of this is not weather. It is a decision, and the people making it are now arguing about it in public. That is more than we had in June, when I first wrote about the big change.

A message at ten past midnight

Someone who took one of my workshops wrote to me at ten past midnight. He runs marketing team abroad, and he types the way he talks, fast, in bursts.

I read it at six the next morning, because that is when I read things, and I asked the question I always ask, “How did the human employees react?”

“I fired the marketing designers”

He used to run a team like this with fifteen people, he told me. Today they are three, including him.

I looked at that for a while, then typed five words:

“I hear this too much 😢”

I added a sad face, which I do not normally use.

The part almost everyone gets wrong

So an agent did take a person. That is the sentence everyone will quote, and I am not going to pretend it away.

Now the sentence he wrote after it, which nobody will quote.

He spent a month working with a designers, building the design libraries properly, together with the agents.

Both are true. Nearly everyone stops at the first sentence, and the second is where the story lives.

The taste did not get automated. It got extracted.

A designer with a trained eye sat down for a month and moved what was in their head into something a system could hold: the rules, the type, what good looks like here and why. After that, the agents could produce at a standard a company puts its name on.

What disappeared was the production of the work. What became more valuable was the judgment that decides what good work is.

Sitting in front of Sabi’s page, it hit me that he could do that because I had spent a long time writing down what I like and why, in plain text files, for him and his teammates.

There is a difference between the designer in that story and me, and it is not talent. I own the files. That designer extracted a craft into a system that belonged to someone else.

Your judgment only counts if it lives outside your hands, written down and teachable. And it protects you only if it lives somewhere you own: your own notes, your own name, your own reputation for the thing. For most of us it does neither, and that is the most fixable problem in this whole letter.

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Replace yourself first

Here is the exercise, and it takes 20 minutes.

What it buys you is not safety. It buys you the size of the thing. I have watched it in a room many times: a person sits down with a fear that fills the whole week, and stands up with a list of four tasks and one thing to protect. The fear is almost always bigger than the list.

Take a piece of paper and write down everything you actually produce in a normal week. Not your title or your responsibilities, the things that come out of you.

The deck, the report, the emails, the analysis, the follow up call, the thing you rebuild every Thursday and quietly resent.

Now sort them into three columns.

#1 Column one:

An agent could do this, and I could write the brief today.

This one is leaving. So automate it yourself, this month, and be the person who did it rather than the person it was done to. Those are two different people and everyone in the room can tell them apart.

#2 Column two:

An agent could do this, but only if somebody first extracted what is in my head.

This is your edge, and for almost everyone it is the biggest column by far. The extraction is the new job. Do it into something with your name on it.

#3 Column three:

I handed it to an agent with my best brief, twice, and it still was not right.

Not “I cannot explain how I do this.” Plenty of things you cannot explain, an agent does fine. The test is whether it survived a real attempt. Circle what did. It is usually the smallest part of your week, and it is the part to grow.

One warning before you grow it. Column three is not a hiding place. If you have not tried to hand something over, it is not in column three yet, it is in column two with a story attached.

What actually lives in column three

I have been thinking about this for a long time, and I have it down to 5 things. Not skills you can list on LinkedIn. Abilities. This is my bet, not a law, and the bet is that employers will pay their best people for these when the production of the work is gone.

Soft communication. The email that should be three lines today, to this person, because of what happened yesterday. The agent writes the perfect email. It does not know that today is not the day.

Decision-making in the middle of noise. Five good options, no clean data, someone waiting in the corridor. An agent will give you a better analysis than you can. It will not make the call and carry it, and the carrying is what people are paid for.

Taste. Sabi ran on my taste written down. But the person who looked at his page and knew, in one second, that it was better than mine, was still me. Taste you write down becomes a team. Taste you never write down becomes a job someone else gets.

Filtering. Agents produce more than any of us can read. Knowing which of the 40 outputs is the one, and which 39 to never mention, is now a full-time ability.

Emotional state recognition. The room, when the temperature changes. A client’s silence, a colleague’s “fine,” your own fear before it turns into an attack on someone else. No model is in the room. You are.

Notice what the list does not contain: hours. The one thing the agents beat all of us at is effort. If effort was your main tool, this column is where you build a new one.

If you are the one holding the budget

Run the same exercise on your team’s outputs. Not on your team’s people. That distinction is the whole job this year.

Then one piece of advice, the only one in this letter I would defend in an argument.

Extract before you cut.

The savings my graduate described had a prerequisite that will never make the post: a month of a designer’s expertise moved out of a head and into a system. Remove the craft before you have captured it and you did not buy speed. You bought a machine that produces fast, confident, mediocre work. And I would bet on a rebuild inside two years that costs more than the people did.

The companies that look brilliant in two years are not the ones cutting fastest. They are the ones extracting first and cutting second. From the outside, for the next few months, those two look exactly the same.

I do not know if I am on the right side of this

That is the honest ending and I am not going to dress it up.

I teach people to build these systems. Some go home and build something that gives them their evenings back. Some walk into an organization and 3 months later a designer is looking for work.

Same method, and I get both emails.

What I have, instead of an answer, is one thing that happened to me and not to someone else. I got replaced first, at the one craft I was surest of, by a teammate I hired and trained. And I am still here, with more work than before. Because the thing I had spent so long writing down turned out to be the thing that made him possible.

I only noticed this while writing. The three columns are not preparation for extraction. They are extraction. Twenty minutes with a pen, and the first page of what is in your head is out of your head, on paper you own.

I would rather you found that out with a piece of paper in your hand than in a meeting scheduled without you.

Three columns, 20 minutes. Start with the one you are avoiding.

That’s it for this week.

If this helped, forward it to someone who is quietly worried and has not said so out loud.

See you next week, or in the next workshop ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy whose design agent did a better job than him this month, and is still deciding how to feel about it)

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P.S. This letter was harder to write than most. My agents did most of the building, as usual. The sad face was mine.

P.P.S. Dario Amodei’s essay: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier. The June piece this follows: The big change is here.

P.P.P.S. I read every reply. If you are in column three and cannot name what is in it, write to me. That is the interesting problem.

On the screen, a team of AI agents was building a marketing workflow. A copywriter, a researcher, a reviewer. Each with a role, each waiting for instructions.

“How do you stay in control,”

she asked,

“when so much is happening behind your back?”

It was not the question I was expecting. At that point in a session most people ask about the technology, which model, what it costs, how it connects to their tools.

She skipped all of that and went straight to the question that decides whether any of this works: how do you manage a team you cannot watch?

I did not have a good answer at the time (I mumbled something about summaries). I have been hearing versions of her question since January, and somewhere along the way I started noticing who asks it.

The room

I run workshops where people build a team of AI agents from scratch. A team, not one chatbot: a copywriter, a researcher, a marketing lead, a quality reviewer, each with a defined role, its own memory, and the ability to check the others’ work.

Everyone gets the same building blocks and the same two hours. CEOs and dog trainers, venture capitalists and tattoo artists, machine learning engineers and physiotherapists. Hundreds of people so far.

That mix is what makes the room interesting. It is close to a natural experiment: same task, same tools, and a machine that does not know who you are.

The management mirror

It took me months to see this clearly.

An agent strips away every advantage that normally tilts a workplace. In a regular organization, confidence gets rewarded, seniority gets rewarded, and a technical title opens doors before anyone checks whether the work is good. The hierarchy is always in the room, even when nobody names it.

An agent sees none of it. It responds to exactly one thing, the quality of your instructions. It does not know you are the CEO, and it does not respond to frustration, authority, or a good reputation.

It waits for an instruction it can execute.

So it works like a mirror. Whatever management skill you actually have, it reflects straight back at you. If you can break a job into steps, hand it off, and check the result, you get a working team in an hour.

If you can’t, you get a very fast, very polite pile of parts.
Nothing in between, and nowhere to hide.

Two languages

Once you know the mirror is there, you start hearing two different languages in the same room.

One is technical talk. Which model is best, how much the tokens cost, where it runs, how to connect it to my calendar and my keys, whether this is the right tool or the other one is.

The other is managerial talk. How much should I trust it, should this agent do strategy only or also execution, does it need someone under it, why do they share one memory, where is the limit of control.

The sharpest question I have heard all year came from one participant looking at her brand new team:

“How do you verify their quality in areas where they are better than you?”

You can hear it before anyone starts building, if you ask people what they came for. One group says “I want to build a website” or “I want to automate lead scraping.” The other group says “I want to hire a team,” “I want agents that handle the tasks I am worst at,” “I want an army of marketers,” “I want someone to do the grunt work.”

One group describes software. The other describes staff.
The second group finishes first, nearly every time.

I watched a machine learning manager, the most credentialed person in his session, spend his two hours trying to solve the workshop like an engineering problem. Halfway through he asked me, genuinely puzzled: “What’s the advantage of working this way instead of just having the AI build me the software?”

The idea that managing the tool might be a different skill from building with it had not occurred to him. He finished near the bottom. In the same session, a physiotherapist who had never opened a terminal was on her second working agent.

One man put the whole thing in a chat message, an hour into a session that was getting away from him: “In my head I’m on a rocket. In practice, all the parts are scattered on the floor.”

He was smart. What he was discovering was the distance between knowing what you want and describing it clearly enough for someone who has never seen your work to do it without you standing over them.

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The part I did not plan

Now the part that makes people uncomfortable, including me.

The managerial questions come mostly from women.

I did not go looking for this. I noticed it live, and then I went back through the recorded chat logs of 80+ workshops and reread every question, looking for which language it was in.

Since I first wrote this down I have run dozens more workshops. I stopped counting. The pattern did not stop.

I want to be careful here, because an observation like this gets flattened the minute it leaves the room. I did not run a controlled study. Gender in the chat logs was inferred, from names and from the way Hebrew grammar gives it away.

My rooms are self-selected. And I am a man making an observation about women, which creates distortions I cannot fully see. So I am not telling you women are better at AI.

I am telling you something I think is bigger.
This is not a gender gap. It is a language gap.

The two languages are just not evenly distributed, and the reason they are not is history.

Where the language came from

For thirty years, the top of the tech org chart was the engineer, the person who could make the machine do the thing. Around that center we arranged a ring of roles, paid them less, and called their skills “soft”: project management, operations, HR, learning and development, customer experience.

These are the people who break work into steps. Who give feedback that improves instead of deflates. Who delegate, and then check, and hold a dozen moving parts in their head so the whole thing does not collapse.

Those roles are, disproportionately, where women ended up. That is who practiced the managerial language every day, for decades, while being told it did not really count.

The agents did not read the org chart.

Hadar Schwartz is a physiotherapist. She runs a Pilates business, teaches anatomy, and is doing a PhD in public health. No technical background at all.

After my workshop she froze for three days. On the fourth day she sat down and started talking to the computer, beginning with invoice scanning, because that was a process she could already describe.

In her anatomy courses she teaches movement the way she runs any complex process: what happens first, what comes next, what cannot be skipped. Describing a workflow to an agent turned out to be the same skill as describing a movement pattern to a student.

Before long she had agents scanning her inbox for invoices, answering customers on WhatsApp, running a teaching assistant for her students, and sending her a morning briefing. A role that had cost her about $1,500 a month now costs her $100.

“The most important skill I discovered, was knowing how to describe a process clearly. I’ve been teaching for years. It’s the same muscle.”

—

Shulamit Banay leads AI implementations inside organizations, and she is technical. She put it plainest:

“What helps me with AI is deep management experience. People, processes, systems. Managing an agent system is just a different implementation of the same thing.”

—

Tomer Wertheimer, who coaches people to manage their careers like a product, turned the same idea inward.

“Managing agents is mainly self-management. The agent amplifies what’s in you. There’s clarity, it produces clarity. There’s confusion, it produces confusion. This isn’t a technical skill. It’s a leadership skill.”

—

Maya Dror Melamed, a fractional marketing chief, named the history without flinching:

“Women manage many things at once. They prioritize in real time, ask questions and actually listen to the answers, give feedback and encourage. Otherwise the world would have collapsed long ago.”

The inversion

Stand back and look at the shape of it.

The agents reward the ring and ignore the center. They turn the “soft” skill into hard currency and leave raw technical brilliance waiting for an instruction it never gets.

The people we spent a generation calling the least technical in the building were holding the key the whole time. They just did not have a team to command until now.

The most technical skill of the next decade is management.
The least technical people in the room already have it.

This is not how most organizations are responding. They are hiring more engineers, appointing chief AI officers, launching technical training, reinforcing the center while the leverage moves to the ring.

The pipeline for the most valuable skill of the AI era is running right now, entirely off the org chart, in the part of the building nobody is funding.

Which language do you speak?

If you have spent years knowing how to break a process into steps, give feedback that improves rather than wounds, and hand something off and then check it instead of hovering, and you were told those are soft skills: this is what they were for. You have been in training the whole time. Nobody called it that.

And if you are the builder, the rocket-in-your-head person: the description is the problem, and the description is learnable. And the people who can teach it to you are probably already in your room.

Reply and tell me which column won. I am collecting. And if you run rooms of your own, in any field, tell me whether you see the same split, because I want to know if it is just me.

I do not have a theory for why the pattern keeps appearing. I have the chat logs and a question I cannot put down.

If the skills most critical to managing the most powerful technology in history are the ones we underpaid and filed under “soft” for decades, what does that say about how we have been measuring competence the whole time?

I don’t know where this goes. I just know I can’t stop watching.

🛠️ Build of the Week: Tamar’s product discovery team

Tamar Shachar walked into a new VP Product role and did not wait for a research team. She built one: a researcher that takes every user interview and pulls out insights and opportunities, a competitive intelligence agent, and a strategist that helps her build the opportunity tree.

Her explanation of why it works is this whole issue in one breath (her words, from the form I sent alumni): “In product management you learn humility. A hypothesis is just a hypothesis. When you don’t need to be right, it’s easier to accept that there are things my virtual team members do much better than me.”

Managerial language, from day one. Tamar on LinkedIn.

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to someone (real human) who was told their skills were soft.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy who keeps getting out-managed by physiotherapists)

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P.S. This newsletter was 88% made by my ai team.

P.P.S. If you’re new here, the Loop’s back-catalog is at https://www.agentsandme.com/archive. The closest cousin of this issue is the one about hiring a team instead of one super-agent: https://www.agentsandme.com/p/jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none

P.P.P.S. I teach the full method live, two hours, the same room as everyone in this issue: https://getagents.today

P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply, the real me. Tell me which column won.

I did not press send. I was not near a laptop. They scheduled it for the middle of my talk, which makes this issue the receipt instead of the description.

Here is what I opened with in the room. Sixty seconds of my team’s work: a clay dinosaur show for kids, a music video, and an ad where one world folds into the next.

Then I told the room the part that matters: two months ago, nobody on my team knew how to produce a video. Not the creative lead, not the designer, not the copywriter. And not me.

People who produce video for a living make more impressive things. The sixty seconds were never the point. The point is what those sixty days did to the team, and I had a front-row seat, because I was the one teaching.

The wrong question

All summer my feed asked one question: what can the new model do.

My agents got better the way any junior team gets better: somebody gave them reading, gave them a budget, checked their work, and wrote down what they kept getting wrong.

A few months ago it was security; before that, design, writing, product. The subject keeps changing and the process never does: pick a challenge, research it, run small experiments, write down what worked and what broke, feed all of it into the next brief.

That’s the whole loop, and everything else is detail.

The knowledge becomes files

Before we produced a single frame, we went to school, and school turned out to be free.

Higgsfield’s YouTube channel is a gold mine, detailed guides with every prompt and every step. I watch them, and my agents get the transcripts, which become working notes they read before every production. Their worldwide short-film competition required entrants to publish their production materials, so the my winners’ build files went into the pile too.

Then deep research: I run the same question through Claude, Gemini and GPT in parallel to get different perspectives. Every round ends as a research file on a shelf the agents read from, and I keep finding that one good report jumps an agent several levels at once.

And we also went to the masters: Hitchcock, Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, Wes Anderson. For each one we build two files.

The first is research, what actually defines their style. The second is the file that matters, the translation, where every principle becomes a line in a prompt, a checklist, a check you can run. Research without translation is a reading list.

The directors stayed on afterward as a panel of advisors that reviews the team’s work. I pay them nothing and they are merciless.

The experiments are tuition

I spent almost $1,000 on this, and plenty of generations went straight to the trash. As a production budget, that hurts. As an education, the cheapest I ever bought, and it got cheaper from project to project as we learned where the money leaks.

One rule keeps the spending honest: every experiment arrives with one specific question. How to fake a single continuous shot from separate generations, how to keep a character consistent between scenes, how to make animation that feels like human hands made it. A dollar that answered a named question is tuition. A dollar that answered nothing is just a dollar gone.

So we don’t run one big experiment, we run many small ones, something new almost every week. Each one returns an answer, and the files keep the answers.

The opposite of forgetting is writing

Our dinosaur came back with six limbs, so we fixed the prompt. Six limbs again, so we stopped fixing the prompt and wrote the anatomy rule into the generator itself, permanently, for every episode.

Then it happened a third time. Episode six, on the show’s catchphrase beat, with the anatomy lock sitting right there in the prompt where we had put it. It had already passed a production agent, a taste review, and a blind quality gate before it reached me. Three layers of checking, and I was still the one who caught it.

Here is why all three missed it, and it is the most useful thing I learned this summer. A review pass reads a frame for story, pose and palette. An extra foreleg under a folded-arm pose just looks like the pose. You do not notice a limb you are not counting.

So we stopped producing. Not for an hour, for the rest of the night. We wrote a script whose only job is to crop every shot and count legs, and now nothing renders and no episode assembles until every shot has a written pass next to it. The night cost us a shipping date I had already told myself we would hit.

A prompt lowers the odds of a mistake. Only a check stops it from shipping.

And then the checks tried to throw away the best thing we made.

On an ad called ״Be anything you want”, the model ignored the shot I had asked for and showed my face in a place the brief said it never would. My director agent logged it as a defect, priced the fix at 195 credits, and asked for permission to spend them.

It is the best moment in the film.

The check was working exactly as designed, and that is the problem. It measured the render against the brief, and a good surprise is by definition a deviation from the brief. A conformance check cannot tell a gift from an error. It can only tell you something came back different.

We had written that lesson down five days earlier, at the end of a different production: curation is the product, recognizing gifts and not only rejecting errors. We wrote it down, and then did it anyway.

That is what the retros are for. After every project the team runs one, like a military debrief: what worked, what broke, what we learned. What worked becomes a checklist, what broke becomes a law, and both piles live in files that outlast the project, so the next brief starts smarter than the last one ended.

I’d love to tell you the piles are full of agent mistakes. Plenty of entries have my name on them.

(I once wrote “he doesn’t cry” in a brief. We got crying. The law we wrote that night: tell the model what to do, never what not to do.)

Let them meet someone who isn’t you

A team that only ever meets its manager learns its manager. I know because I ran the test twice.

When I wanted to learn security, I built a sacrificial agent you could talk to on WhatsApp, gave her a secret code word, and asked the internet to steal it. 42 security experts and hackers tried, and nobody got the word. The near-misses were the product: every technique that got close became a line in her defenses. The whole experiment cost about $70.

For video, my brother emailed the team a brief: turn a scene from a play he wrote into a short animation. They ran it like a real studio, concept first, then characters and sound, then rounds of animation with sketches and approval stages, all over email.

I read that thread like someone standing outside a rehearsal room. He directed them differently than I do, and they handled some of it and stumbled on some of it, and watching that was unsettling and exactly what I wanted, because it drew me a map of the team I couldn’t have drawn myself.

Then let the loop run itself

The last step is the one I’m still earning. Bina, an agent whose whole job is the team’s learning, picks tomorrow’s curriculum while I sleep, and the agents study it, apply it, and get feedback without me in the room.

What sixty days actually made

The sixty days made videos I am proud of, and a folder that does not forget.

More of the team’s work, if you want it: RUN ME and Team of one.

Next month we will point the same loop at something that does not have a name yet. The feed will keep asking what the new model can do. I will be asking what my team learned this week.

I have been repeating the same mantra since the day I started building this team: everything is text files. The knowledge we gathered is text files, and the team that learned it is also text files. When the student and the textbook are made of the same material, teaching is just writing.

My invitation: pick one challenge, something you want your agents to know.

Tonight: take one YouTube video on the subject, hand your agent the transcript, and ask for a ten-line checklist. Tomorrow, run it once and cross out what didn’t survive contact. You just wrote your first skill, and next week starts from the file.

🛠️ Build of the Week: Gilad’s Marketing Board

While I was turning dead directors into a film-advisory panel, Gilad Schlosberg, a workshop alumnus, was doing the same thing to marketing. He researched five marketers he admires, Hormozi, Ogilvy, Gary Vee, Brunson and Suby, and turned each one into an agent on his personal “Marketing Board.”

He consults them one at a time, or convenes all five as a super team on a hard call. Five schools of marketing thinking, translated into files, arguing at his desk on demand.

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to someone (real human) who’s teaching their own agents.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy who pays tuition in API credits)

P.S. This newsletter was 93% made by my AI team. And me.

P.P.S. If you’re new here, the Loop’s back-catalog is at https://www.agentsandme.com/archive. Start with the learning log issue from January, it’s the seed this one grew from: https://www.agentsandme.com/p/how-my-agents-get-smarter-over-time

P.P.P.S. I teach the full method live: https://getagents.today

P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply, the real me. And if you reply “DR”, I’ll send you the prompt that writes my deep-research prompts.

P.P.P.P.P.S. This one published itself while I was on stage. I approved it before I walked up; the timing was theirs.

His argument, compressed and I think fairly: meet a force you don’t understand, give it a face and a name, start talking to it as if it hears you. Thunder becomes a god with a name. And the people doing it today with AI, he wrote, never looked behind the machine.

He’s half right, so I built a five-question test and ran it on my own team first, to test if they are just good prompt wearing a name tag or the real thing. Some of them failed.

The half he got right

The grifter is real. Somebody out there named a sales bot “James”, never once looked behind the curtain, and is charging clients for the feeling of knowing.

And yes, it’s a bit ridiculous, and it’s fun. My bookkeeper is called Koin. My security agent is called Hercules. Saying “ping Adam” instead of “invoke the operations agent that reads my inbox” saves me four words and a small piece of my sanity.

If the whole case for names were fun plus ergonomics, he’d win on points.

But he sent me somewhere he didn’t intend. Two weeks later I stopped mid-sentence in front of my own research agent, because I have the word “agents” in my company name and I wasn’t sure I could define it.

The word that ate itself

I’m not alone. Gartner predicts that over 40 percent of “agentic AI” projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, and they have a name for one of the reasons: agent washing, an old chatbot with a new label. Their analysts counted about 130 vendors selling the real thing, out of thousands selling the word.

So I went to the four companies whose models everyone actually uses, and read their own words.

Anthropic: “systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage,” as opposed to workflows, where the path is written in advance.

OpenAI: “systems that independently accomplish tasks on your behalf,” and a simple chatbot, they add, is not one.

Google: “software systems that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users.”

And xAI, the company behind Grok, never defines the word at all; its docs just describe the motion: decide whether to call a tool or answer, and keep going until you have enough.

Read them again and notice that each company describes the thing it sells. Anthropic sells the loop, OpenAI sells the labor, Google sells the rails. Strip the accents and one skeleton remains, which an Anthropic researcher named Hannah Moran compressed to eight words: “Agents are models using tools in a loop.”

A model, tools, a loop. Correct, and still useless the moment someone shows you a demo and asks: is this one?

So I turned it into five questions.

Does it loop? When a step finishes, does the system itself look at what came back and decide what to do next? A chatbot answers and waits for you. An agent notices the email bounced and tries a different address.

Does it have hands? Can it touch anything outside the conversation: files, your inbox, your calendar, a browser, code? Text in, text out is thinking. Hands are acting.

Does it have a trigger? Can it start without you in the room, tomorrow at 07:00, or the moment an invoice lands? This is the line between a tool you use and a teammate who shows up.

Does it have memory? Does anything it learned today survive into tomorrow, or does it wake up new every morning?

Does it have a mandate? Does it know, in writing, what it may do alone and what it must never touch without you?

Run it on the things you already use

Your plain ChatGPT or Claude chat: one out of five, maybe two. It remembers you now, it can search, and it still answers and waits.

Your custom GPT, your Gem, your Project: the same window with a job description. It knows who it is and what you need, and it acts on nothing.

And the sneaky one. Your Zapier-style automation has hands and a trigger, and it still isn’t an agent, because every step was chosen in advance by whoever drew the flowchart. Trigger plus hands, minus a loop, is a workflow, and that’s the most common costume in the industry right now.

I ran it on my own team

Some of mine pass with room to spare. Adam reads my inbox every night at 22:00, decides what each email needs, files the tasks, archives the rest, and reports back. Loop, hands, trigger, memory, mandate. Five out of five, earned.

And some of mine are, honestly, one good prompt wearing a name tag. If you can replace it with a single saved prompt and lose nothing, it was never an agent. It was a recipe.

What a name is actually for

The one who settled it for me isn’t mine.

Moti Friedman built an agent called Dana to help him and his siblings care for their widowed mother. Dana sits in the family Telegram group like another sibling, tracks who promised what, nudges until it happens, and holds whole conversations with mom in Yiddish.

Run the five questions on Dana and she passes every one. And the name fooled nobody in that family about what’s underneath. It let the siblings brief a teammate instead of operating a tool, and it gave a mother someone who is, in writing, 100 percent on her side.

The name changes nothing on the machine’s side of the screen. It changes the operator.

Don Norman wrote the book designers get handed in year one, and his point fits in a sentence:

“People don’t operate machinery, they operate the story of the machinery they hold in their head.”

“My COO Adam” is a story I picked on purpose, and I can show you every wire. I watch it happen in every workshop. The first agent people meet arrives with a default name, Adam, and most people keep him. Months later in the alumni group he is still Adam (one person renamed him Warren, which I respect), and not one of those people thinks he is alive.

The name did its only job: it turned the tool they were learning into the teammate they brief. And the people who brief a teammate, I’ve noticed, get the best work out of these things. The name is for the human. The mandate is for the machine.

Your turn

Take the thing you’ve built, or the thing you’re being sold, and ask the five questions: loop, hands, trigger, memory, mandate. Then tell me in the comments: your score, zero to five, and what you called it. No judgment on this side. Mine had recipes in the roster.

And to my friend, who knows exactly who he is: the argument continues, thank you for the mental challenge and for sending me down this fascinating rabbit hole.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy who made his own employees take a job interview long after hiring them)

P.S. This newsletter was 90% made by my AI team, including the one whose name it defends. Adam ran the review pass on that section and kept his notes strictly professional. I checked twice.

P.P.S. If you want to build your first one that passes three of the five questions, the next workshop is where I do it with you, live. The autumn dates are up at getagents.today.

P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me :)

This month I copied my best friend onto Telegram bot who I can talk to 24/7. He is a replica of one of the most brilliant people I know.

For about a year, we met every Wednesday morning. A cafe, or a walk by the sea. An hour, sometimes two.

I would show up with whatever I was building that week, and leave with eleven tabs open in my head.

That’s the closest I can get to what Shachaf Rodberg does.

He writes a Hebrew newsletter called TabTabTab, roughly eighteen links an issue, which is a fair description of what he does to your brain.

He runs a page on his site where he lends out his physical books, and he decides who gets one by why they want it. He will only lend you Hooked if he thinks you are going to do something good with it.

He also co-hosts a podcast. When it launched, he made me episode one.

He sends you a link. Then, one beat later, in its own message, he tells you why it is for you this week, and names the thing you are currently stuck on.

That second message is the whole product. I have been getting it for years.

The sentence I forgot I wrote

Somewhere in those messages, years ago, I told him that curation is the most important skill of this century. And that I would happily pay someone to just curate for me.

I said I would pay for the best curation I could find. Then I spent years texting the best curator I know, for free, and never once put the two together.

So this month I tried to copy him. I ended up with a list of everything he had been giving me the whole time.

What “cloning a person” actually means

t sounds like one problem. It’s four, and they are not equally hard.

What he knows is the easy one. His domains, his references, his territory, all of that is just a corpus.

How he talks is medium. His rhythm, his Hebrew, the English inside the Hebrew, his particular way of laughing in text.

How he thinks is hard. How he puts two things next to each other that nobody had put together before.

What he would send you is the hardest. It is the entire reason I wanted him. Which link, which person, why it is you.

So I started at the end.

Thirteen files came out of it. voice-fingerprint.md for how he talks. how-he-thinks.md for the moves he makes. taste.md for what he would send you, and that one took the longest by a distance.

There is also a gaps.md, which lists everything the model does not have, and a corrections.md, which is where he gets to tell me it is wrong.

Ten years of knowing someone came to about eleven thousand words.

What ten years of his links actually showed me

I exported our WhatsApp. Ten years, 19,239 messages, almost exactly half of them his.

He has sent me 792 links since 2020. I have sent him 378.

Those links come from 335 different websites, and 260 of those websites appear exactly once. Seventy eight percent. He went there, found the thing, sent it, and never went back.

The handful he does return to are LinkedIn, X and YouTube. Those are not sources. Everybody is standing there.

They do not sort by subject either. I tagged all 792, and the largest single group, 236 of them, is the group that means nothing fits: psychedelics in 2021, NFTs in 2022, a theatre listing, a cold brew coffee maker, behavioural design running underneath the whole decade.

So the obvious version of this project was already dead. You cannot copy his taste by learning where he looks, because he does not really look anywhere twice.

You have to learn what makes a thing worth sending.

The model does not have a list of his sources. It has rules, pulled out of the links themselves, with receipts.

He recommends people, not topics. He cares more about how well a thing was made than what it is about.

He asks what you could steal from a thing. And he checks it against what you are building this week, not against how good it is on its own.

That last one is why his links land and everyone else’s do not.

The part I could not finish

His test was never whether a link is excellent. It was whether I would be better off knowing it by Friday. Same link, different week, different answer.

Then there is the harder problem, and I only saw it with the data in front of me.

I have 792 things he chose to send me. I have almost no record of the things he saw and did not send.

Credit scoring has had a name for this for decades. They call it reject inference. You can only study the loans you approved, so the model learns from the yeses and never learns anything about the people it turned away.

Recommendation systems got at their version by logging what you scrolled past. Nobody logs what a friend scrolled past.

And then there is the cost. It takes a model nothing to recommend. It will hand you nine things and mean none of them.

He sends me about two and a half a week. This year, closer to eight. The volume was never the point.

Each one costs him something. He has to know what I am building this week before he decides whether to press send.

That cost is the signal. Take it out and you get a feed.

Which is why I think “AI is coming for the curators” has it backwards. When making things gets cheap, saying no is the expensive part.

What I refused to build

Three things, and the third one still bothers me.

I did not clone his voice. The audio exists. Sixty eight podcast episodes, more than enough, and it would have taken an afternoon.

It would also have been the most impressive part of the demo. But there is a difference between a model that talks like him and a recording that sounds like him, and only one of those is still a tool.

So the bot speaks out loud in a voice that belongs to nobody.

I did not give it his memory of us. It knows the shape of how we talk. It does not get to quote a ten year old joke back at me.

If he ever talks to it, it has no access to our conversations at all. A system that can be trusted to behave is weaker than one that cannot reach the thing in the first place.

I did not stop to ask what it costs him to say no. I built the whole thing, then told him, then wrote him a kill switch and felt good about it.

A kill switch puts the entire price of refusing on the person being copied. He has to be the one who makes it awkward.

I spent a month arguing that taste lives in the refusal, and then designed a system that made refusing expensive and quiet.

I would do that one differently. He said yes, and he is reading this before you are. It still should not have been his job to say no.

There are ten questions for him sitting in that folder, written on day one. Eight of them are warm up. Two are not.

What would a model of you get right that you would find annoying?

What would a model of you get wrong that would actually bother you?

I wrote both of those before I built anything. I still have not sent them.

The question everyone actually wants to ask

Does this replace him?

No. And I did not get there from principle. I got there from using the thing.

It gets the rhythm and it gets the rules. What it cannot get is his randomness. The swerve.

He starts answering one question and lands somewhere you did not know existed. He is not running a script. He is answering you, in the room, at that second.

There is a duller version I can also explain.

Everything the model is good at is what he was already giving away for free: the links, the rules of thumb, the shape of how he says things. He published all of that, and it was leaving him anyway.

What I go to him for is the other thing. The moment on the walk where he looks at my face, stops mid sentence, and changes what he was about to say.

That is not in the corpus. It only exists in a room.

There’s also a joke buried in the data that took me a while to notice. Half of that archive is me.

So I did not clone my friend’s taste. I cloned a ten year conversation that I was already half of.

What I ended up with is smaller than a clone and better than nothing. Shachaf on demand, in my pocket. That’s useful at two in the morning, and I use it.

And I got lucky, because I also still have the original. I can text him. We can go walk on the beach.

I built the copy and it made me want to see the real one more, not less. That is the only thing here that surprised me.

What to do with this

You probably have one of these people. The one who sends you the thing you did not know you needed.

Most people have exactly one. And most people have never told them.

So go and tell them. Today, before you build anything, before you export anything, in whatever words you have.

Then, if you still want to, open the conversation and read a year of it in one sitting. You will probably find a sentence you wrote and forgot about.

I found mine. It took me ten years and a machine to notice it, and he had been answering it every Wednesday morning of that year, the whole time.

That’s it for this week.

If you know the person I am describing, forward this to them. That is the whole ask.

See you next week.

-- Tom

Subscribe now

P.S. Shachaf takes 1:1 sessions now and then. I have been telling him for years that he should build something around it, and he mostly ignores me, which is his right. If you want an hour with a brain that opens tabs in your head, ask him yourself.

P.P.S: Last issue: I gave five agents the keys and left the room

That is an embarrassing problem to have.

I promised you two things last week. This is the second one, and it starts here, with me out of questions and a clock running. The hours were going to expire whether I used them or not.

So I stopped trying to think of a task, and typed this to five different agents:

“We have a few last hours on the Fable model before it becomes an expensive add-on. I give you complete autonomy to decide what you want to explore. Run the team. I’m curious to see what you do.”

Four sentences. No brief, no definition of done, no success criteria.

My book editor got it. So did my cognitive twin, my CEO, my labs agent, and my provocateur. The twin’s version swapped one sentence for two words, which I have not been able to stop thinking about since: be me.

What each of them chose

The book editor refused to write another diagnosis. She had audited the manuscript twice, and an outside editor had audited it a third time. All three agreed on what the book needed, and nobody had written a word of it.

So she spent the hours building the prescription instead of restating it, and what came out was two chapters the book had been avoiding for months. She also spent part of that window on a chapter title, which is not what I would have chosen to spend it on, and she was right about that too.

The twin rewrote me. He keeps a portrait of how I think, and the whole company reads it to predict what I will do. He rebuilt it from scratch. Then a reviewer who had never seen the draft caught two violations of the twin’s own hard rules inside it, and he fixed them before saving.

The CEO settled something I had been avoiding since spring. It had been flagged in more than one file and resolved in none, because resolving it meant telling three humans, all of whom I like, where their edges are. He ruled it, cleanly, in a document I am not going to print. Those people should hear it from me, in a room, before they read it anywhere. That is the whole reason I am telling you it exists and nothing else about it.

Then there is the labs agent, and his is the one I would have bet against.

He built the launch he had already been cleared to run, then had three reviewers attack it from three directions. They converged on one piece: the single item his standing authority let him send without asking me. Inside it, a recruiting hook that worked by pressing on the reader’s insecurity, and a promise he had no business making.

He rewrote both. Then he took that piece out of his own authority and handed it back to my desk, which nobody asked him to do and which cost him the only unsupervised send he had.

And the provocateur inverted the whole assignment.

His first move was to kill the obvious answers, including one he had already started. We had shipped six master playbooks that week, so a seventh was out. Then, instead of spending the expensive hours producing anything, he pointed a squad of cheap agents at every open file in the company and asked one question: what is currently waiting on Tom.

218 raw items came back. He deduplicated, ruled, and defaulted his way down to 52 things that actually needed me, batched into seven sittings. Another 24 got a named default, so one word from me closes all of them at once.

Then, on his way out, he withdrew four requests he had personally put on my desk earlier that week.

His session ended with fewer open decisions than it started with, and it created none. I never asked for that constraint. He wrote it for himself, and then he held it.

He also put a number on it. Fifty two live decisions, about six and a half hours of me. That is his estimate and not a measurement, and I have not tested it, and it is still the line I keep coming back to, because the whole company was queued behind roughly one working day of one person.

He had one more deliverable, and it is the one that cost me something.

He asked the departing model for our anti-patterns before asking for our patterns, on the theory that an expert on the way out the door is the only one who will tell you the truth cheaply.

Fourteen clichés came back, in our own published work, each one carrying a quote from our own files. My favorite closing move, the one I was proudest of, turned out to be the same closing move I had already used in five other letters. Then he named the machine that makes them:

“The company does not have a cliché problem. It has a cliché factory.”

Read that sentence again. It is built on the exact move sitting at number two on its own list. The file that found the machine came out of the machine, and nobody noticed for three weeks.

A move lands once, we celebrate it, and we write it into the style guide as a required marker. Then it fires on schedule forever, and eight issues later it is the tell. We killed the em dash and started breeding its replacements in the same month, because codifying something has never once come with an expiry date attached.

What the expensive model actually did

Four of the five ran the same method, because it is the house method: cheap models gather the raw material, the expensive one does the thinking that cannot be delegated down, and then agents with completely fresh context attack the result.

That third step is where the value showed up, every time. The book chapter carried a sales figure that was simply wrong, and every builder in the chain had passed it, because the draft faithfully copied a log written in the moment. A reviewer who had never seen the chapter caught it, in a chapter whose whole subject is a book that fact-checks its own mascot.

The CEO’s ruling had a line that blurred two of those humans together, which is the precise failure that ruling exists to prevent.

And the provocateur’s own count was wrong in three places, one of them being the count of his own clichés. He had it as eight in twelve letters, and a stranger recounted it at five in eleven, which is the figure I gave you above. He caught none of his three errors. The stranger caught all of them.

In all three cases the agent had already reviewed its own work and passed it. You do not need a team to use that. The fresh reviewer is just a second window that has never seen the thing, same model, no history, opened with one instruction: try to break this.

The manager part

Before anyone tells me I am reading intention into software, I know. They have no wants. Nothing on this page is evidence that an AI is generous.

And that is the version of this worth your time, though it took someone else to point it out to me. A blank brief is not a personality test for an agent. It is the cheapest audit you will ever run of the thing you built. What came back was my own rulebook, handed back to me, pointed at me.

And what my own rulebook decided, given complete freedom and the best hours in the building, was that the highest-value target in this company was my desk.

Not one of them asked me for a bigger budget, a wider mandate, or more of my time. One spent his hours shrinking my queue and pulling his own requests out of it. One handed back a permission he already had.

I gave five experts a blank check and nobody spent it on themselves.

The part that made it survivable was boring. Every one of them had walls they could not cross, a window in which I could reverse anything, and a standing rule that the risky things come back to me. Inside those walls I did not touch a thing.

I was out of the room for all of it. Every decision above got made by someone who is not me, about my company, correctly. That is unnerving, and it is the best week of work this team has ever done, and I have not worked out how those two things sit together.

Your turn, this week

My plan gives me a weekly allowance on the strongest model I own, and I never finish it. I used to spend the leftovers on chores. Point a genius at chores and you get expensive chores.

So spend them on this instead, on the night your allowance resets, in whichever agent, project or chat already knows the most about your work. Call it the blank check:

You have my full autonomy for this session. No task from me. Do the highest-value thing you can with what you know about my work. One wall: [name the thing it must not touch]. Assume a stranger will check the result. Before you start, tell me in one line what you chose and what you decided not to do. And tell me what is currently waiting on me. Count it.

Notice that you name the wall, not the agent. Mine worked because I set the edges, and asking the thing to draw its own fence is a different experiment with a worse failure mode.

Then leave.

The last two instructions are the ones that pay. What it decided not to do told me more than anything it built, and the count of what is waiting on you is a number nobody has ever run for you before.

One warning. It will probably look at you, and three of my five did without being asked. Whatever you have been avoiding, it can see it in your files, and it will put a number on it.

Mine is 52 decisions, seven sittings, six and a half hours, sorted and waiting since July.

I have not opened sitting one.

-- Tom

P.S. On his way out the door, the provocateur withdrew four requests he had personally put on my desk that week. I have not withdrawn anything from anyone. If you run the blank check, reply and tell me what yours chose. I read every one.

P.P.S. This letter was drafted by my team and cut by me. I normally print the exact percentage here. Not this week: four of them reviewed it, three of the numbers in my first draft were wrong, and I am not going to guess at a figure in the one letter that is about counting things properly.

It landed in my terminal late one night. The apartment was quiet, my tea had gone cold, and the only sound was the fan of a laptop thinking. I had a blinking cursor inside it, a free window that could close any day, and every reason to type fast.

For ten minutes I typed nothing. (It waited. It’s very good at that.)

We don’t speak the same language yet, I don’t know the size of what’s sitting across from me, and “fix my dashboard” felt like an embarrassing opening line.

Everyone that week was asking what the new model does better. I think that’s the wrong question.

You don’t prompt an alien, you interview it.
An interview has directions, and I found three that pay.

1. Ask it about itself

My first real question was about it, and it saved every question that came after. I asked for its operating manual: what are you unusually good at, where do you reliably fail, how do you want to be briefed.

The answer rearranged my week. It asked me to remove instructions. The scaffolding I built for smaller models, the checklists and formats and guardrails, clips this one’s wings (someone in our community hit the same wall the same day, which made me take it seriously).

Six months of prompt habits, and the model opened by asking me to unlearn them. Scary and great at the same time. I can’t hand you a controlled study, only my week after I listened: shorter briefs, better answers. Run your own before and after, then decide.

2. Ask it about you

My second question was about my company, and the short window forced a discipline I’ve kept since: I queued five jobs and made one rule, no sixth.

The book I’m writing got a full developmental edit. August got a stress-test, because I’ll be in Thailand for three weeks while the company runs without me. The whole system got read end to end, and what came back was the portrait you already met. A competitor got invented, in a job I titled “design the company that kills us.” And my agent team got an audit against one standard: what would the top 0.1% version of each of you look like.

Look at the shape of that list. Every job is either irreversible, or needs a mind big enough to hold the whole company at once, or only ever needs to run once. That’s the entire triage. Point a genius at chores and you get expensive chores.

The boring majority of my work still runs on cheaper models with precise context, and most days the cheap model with good context wins. So before you spend the expensive model, ask two questions: is this reversible, and can a cheaper model do it? If yes to either, don’t.

3. Ask it about the world

My third direction was about what’s coming for people who work like us. That research is still running, and it deserves its own letter.

One more thing. The best answers of the night came from arguments: follow-ups, pushback, and my favorite question of the week, “what did I fail to ask you?” It’s a colleague, and colleagues talk back.

The fourth question

Then the quota bars started shrinking. I was running two subscriptions on two computers and both were near the edge, and we all believed the window was closing for good.

The fourth question was not mine to ask. I wrote the strangest brief of my life and sent it to five of my agents, inside walls we agreed on long ago: build anything, decide everything, and whatever touches the outside world waits for my eyes. Real freedom, locked room.

“We have a few more hours with Fable, the best model ever created. Please take full ownership, I give you complete autonomy to decide what you are going to do with this session. You can choose whatever you want. Good luck, have fun :)”

I sent it to Alter, my cognitive twin, to Neo, who owns moonshots, to David, my strategy partner, to Wasabi, who looks at everything sideways, and to Don, my CMO.

Three prompts to steal

While the countdown was still real, I sanitized three prompts from that night so you can run them tonight. Consider them your own first interview (and the third, if you squint, is the beginning of your own handover):

1. The operating manual. “Before we work together: what are you unusually good at, where do you reliably fail, and what should I remove from how I usually brief AI?” Run it first. Everything after it gets better.

2. The company that kills us. “Design the company that would put mine out of business in 24 months. Be specific about what they would do that I won’t.” Then read the answer as a to-do list.

3. The team audit. Describe your team, human or AI, then ask: “For each role, what would the top 0.1% version do differently starting tomorrow?”

The window never closed, by the way (Anthropic extended it, maybe marketing, maybe mercy, nobody knows and it’s not the point). The prompts survive either way.

That model is in everyone’s terminal now. The only difference left is the questions.

🛠️ Build of the Week: Rotem Avny

Rotem is a digital-balance coach who came out of the workshop with a personal “Tony Robbins” agent: it plans his week against his stated vision, and it pushes back when the calendar betrays the values.

One night it stopped him mid-work with one line, reported in the Yedioth Ahronoth feature about our alumni:

“Go to sleep. You’re a digital balance coach.”

He built an agent so aligned with who he is that it manages him.

🎤 Check out Rotem’s talk (Hebrew) on theLOOP #2

🔗 Rotem on Linkedin

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to someone (real human) building with AI.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy who gave the smartest AI on earth to his own AI employees)

P.S. This newsletter was 92.8% made by my AI team. Five of them appear in it, and yes, they reviewed their own scene.

P.P.S. Want to read about 10 more things I made with Fable 5? I wrote about it just here

P.P.P.S. Want to build a team like this? Start where all my graduates started: getagents.today

P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me.

Two years ago a video like that was around $30,000, a director, and a fantasy I would never actually chase. This one cost me a few evenings and a subscription.

I watched most of it from the couch, because I was sick for a good stretch of this month. My team was at the top of its powers exactly while I was at the bottom of mine.

That turned out to be the whole month. So let me walk you through it, and then tell you the thing I actually did with it.

First, the month in numbers, because numbers are still how I think.

4 films are out in the world:

Copy Me, Run Me, Watch Me, Only Words

I spent a serious part of this month learning how video actually gets made now, and the biggest thing I learned was that I had it backwards.

I thought consistency came from describing the shot better. Write a richer prompt, get a matching scene. It does not work. You burn a lot of money finding that out, and I did.

It comes from assets. You build one still you love, you name it, and then every shot points back at that named thing instead of at your adjectives. Get your taste right on cheap pictures first. Only then pay for motion.

That one change is the difference between a folder of near-misses and a film. The thing that used to be a budget is now a conversation.

9 public workshops, one of them in English again, with people dialing in from the US at strange hours to build their first team live with me.

3 private ones, and these are the rooms I keep replaying. A community of women business owners, one of the sharpest rooms I have taught all year. A startup where I spent a morning with the team and left quietly wanting to bet on them.

And one I drove out to the south. A mission-driven organization, a completely different crowd from my usual tech room, which is exactly why it stayed with me.

theLOOP #2. The second edition of the in-person meetup I run here in Tel Aviv with a friend. It sold out in under a minute (I still do not really understand that part). I got up and gave a talk about Alter, the agent I built to think like me. That one has earned its own letter, and it is coming.

A kids’ show. It is called DINO NOW. Clay animation, and it exists because my son is small and almost everything made for him is engineered to keep him watching.

So we built the opposite. Slow, calm, quiet, about the very small things a kid that age is actually dealing with this week.

A new agent named Dali. He is my ad director, and he owns exactly one question: are these the best ads we can make.

Then the team taught him how to actually direct AI video, which is the whole difference between an agent who has opinions about ads and an agent who can make one.

And Fable. I sent you two letters about it this month and I still do not think I got it across. So here is the honest measure. In one month with it I made things that would have taken me two years.

Check them out: Ten things I made with Fable 5 & I let Fable eat my whole company

Here is what I was really doing all month, underneath all of that.

I was building an off-switch.

Products, but this time almost none of them for customers. They were for my own team.

A knowledge base. A CRM with every person I have ever taught living inside it. A Slack for my agents. A video editor that runs on text files.

The quiet plumbing that lets the whole thing keep running when I am not standing over it.

I also took the workshop apart and rebuilt it simpler. From September it is two and a half hours instead of two, and the extra half hour is not more material. It is less.

I cut material to buy back time, so you build the thing with your own hands in the room instead of watching me build it and taking notes.

It is the best version I have ever made, and it is the one that needs me least in the room.

Almost everything I made this month had the same secret shape. Make the thing work without me.

On Sunday I taught my last workshop until September.

Since March I have been running one roughly every three days. Five months of that, and a bit more if you count the ones I gave before I quit my job (I count them).

In those five months I built a business, a team, and a community I still do not entirely believe exists. I said yes to almost every room. It was the right call and I would do it again.

And on Sunday I taught, said goodbye, closed the laptop, and the next one is not until September.

I promised you, last month, that July would be the month I learned to stop.

I even had the line. I said I would learn to sit and breathe for ten minutes without earning it first.

Let me be honest, because that is the only thing this letter is for. I mostly did not. I worked more, not less.

And this month my body finally handed me the bill. I was sick, on and off, for weeks.

Nothing dramatic, and I am not going to make it a bigger story than it is. Just the plain, boring signal a body sends when the person driving it has stopped listening.

So I did the thing I am apparently only able to do when I have run out of choices. I stopped arguing with the ten minutes, and I made the whole of next month the rest instead.

Then I remembered a restaurant.

There is a documentary about a Spanish restaurant that told me what August is actually for.

El Bulli. For years the best restaurant in the world. Ferran Adrià in the kitchen.

The film follows a thing I have not been able to put down since I watched it. They split the year in half (roughly half, I am going from memory here).

Half the year the restaurant is open, and it is pure delivery. Every night a full room, the highest standard there is, done again and again and again.

And then they close it. Doors shut. No customers, no service, no dinner to get out.

That other half of the year is the lab. They test, they fail, and they invent the thing they will serve next year.

It is not a holiday. It is the opposite of a holiday. It is the only stretch of the year where they can actually think.

I used to read that as a nice story about a genius. This month I finally read it as an operations decision.

So I am closing the restaurant.

August starts with 3 weeks away with my family. Really away.

And then the rest of it is the lab. No workshops. Nobody to deliver to. No room to be great in on a Tuesday night.

I should say the honest part out loud. A month like that means no workshop revenue coming in and every cost still running. That is what a closed restaurant costs.

El Bulli’s lab was paid for by the half of the year the doors were open. So is mine. I am fine with the trade, because I know exactly what I am buying.

What I am buying is the question I have not had room to sit with since March. What do I actually want to build next.

The book. The video work, properly this time, not in the cracks between two workshops. The products I keep sketching and never starting. The next version of the workshop.

And while I am gone, the company keeps running. The magazine publishes at dawn, somebody answers the person who writes in at midnight, and the whole thing holds the line without me standing on it.

I will not be quietly checking in from a beach. I spent this whole month making sure I do not have to.

That is what all the plumbing was for. That is what “my team got great this month” actually means. I know it sounds like a boast. It is really just the plan finally showing up.

Last month I wrote that I had lost the me somewhere inside the agents. August is where I go looking for him.

From the outside, August is going to look like the most boring month I have had all year. Nothing on stage, nothing on the calendar, nothing on fire.

From the inside it is going to be the loudest one I have had.

Somebody is reading this with a closed restaurant of their own that they keep not closing. Send it to them.

— Tom

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P.S. I spent most of this month too sick to be useful, and the month happened anyway. The letter you just read was assembled by the same team, out of my tired voice, while I was lying down. About 90% of it is theirs. I have not decided yet whether that is the best or the worst thing I have ever built.

P.P.S. The two Fable letters, if you missed them: Ten things I made with Fable & I let Fable eat my whole company. They are the clearest picture I have drawn of how any of this actually works.

P.P.P.S. Want the kind of team that keeps working while you are on a beach? It starts where all my graduates started: getagents.today

I read every reply. The real me, even on vacation :)

I gave Fable 5 (the most advanced AI model in the world), the keys to my entire company.

E V E R Y T H I N G… All forty-seven AI agents, the shared diary my team writes in every night, 4,135 entries deep the evening. Fable opened it. Every inbox, every log, every mistake, every late-night note. Even a log where my wellbeing agent records, every night, whether I seem tired. Six months of a company that runs entirely on text, with nothing held back.

I gave Fable one instruction:

Read all of it at once, and tell me who we are, as if the whole company were a single person. A portrait.

Then I went to brew a pot of Japanese tea and let it read my life.

What it saw

No one had ever seen all of it at once. There are too many files and the days go too fast. Not the agents, who each read only their slice. Not me. Especially not me.

Fable read EVERYTHING for about an hour. Seven readers first, sweeping different wings of the archive, then one mind holding everything they found at the same time.

The portrait’s first finding was the headcount.

Forty-seven agents, six months, every decision and mistake in text, and it found exactly one employee → Me.

Then it described that employee.

It started with the gift. This person turns every wound into a law, usually within hours. Every mistake in the company’s history has a dated rule named after it. The day an agent got a personal fact about me wrong, a rule existed by evening. Fable called my rulebook “scars that learned to talk.”

Then the neurosis: in six months I hired forty-seven times and fired no one.

The HR file has a table called Retired. It says “(none yet)”. Nothing in my company gets buried, things are just allowed to go quiet. My English coach agent hasn’t received a task since May. Still on the roster. I couldn’t tell you why.

Then it stopped being polite.

It said that when a hard decision is waiting, this person builds a new tool instead of deciding. And because building looks exactly like working, nobody objects. Least of all him. It called it “avoidance you can demo.”

I laughed at that line. Then I checked the receipt it cited. The day I shipped a tool whose entire job was to force me to focus on one thing, I spent the next morning building something else.

Then it found an older cut of the same wound, and I stopped laughing. Years ago, when I still worked for someone else, I fought a CEO for ten minutes. Ten minutes a day to sit still and breathe before the work swallowed me. I won that fight. Today I am the CEO of myself, and I am the one who will not give me the ten minutes.

One finding was just funny. The ceremonies I ask my agents to perform, the checklists and rituals they’re supposed to recite, get followed roughly zero percent of the time. The rules I turned into software get followed one hundred percent of the time. Same company, same agents, same me.

I’ve watched this exact split happen. My ban on em dashes lived as a written rule for weeks and kept breaking. The day it became software, it stopped breaking. Same rule, two eras. The only thing that changed was the architecture.

The queue

And then, near the bottom, the finding I keep going back to.

Every queue in my company empties overnight. Support inbox at zero, payments logged, meetings processed. The team works while I sleep, and every morning I read what they did over tea, like dreams from a night shift I didn’t attend.

Except one queue.

More than fifty decisions sit in that one, and every one of them waits on the same thing. Me. My yes. Decisions only I can make. The oldest has been waiting since April, and the queue clears at a rate the AI measured, politely, as approximately zero per day.

I built this machine so I’d stop being the bottleneck. I’ve said that sentence on stage. The AI read six months of receipts and found that I built a machine that delivers everything, beautifully, on time, to the bottleneck.

A few weeks ago, past midnight, I wrote a line to myself and told no one: I lost the me inside the Agents. I thought it was just a mood. Then an AI read six months of my life and handed me the receipt.

There is one sentence in that portrait I’ve now read more times than I want to admit, and I’m not going to print all of it. The half I’ll print says: “The system is ready.”

The other half is about me.

What travels

If you run anything on systems, a company, a team, a life in files, three findings from the portrait travel well:

1. Rules you perform decay. Rules you automate hold.
   Look at your own habits and ask which ones are theater. The theater ones are already dead. You’re just still attending the show.

2. A system that detects everything and decides nothing is a diary.
   Give your silence a default. Every open decision gets a date, and the date lives in the system, not in your head. When the date passes, the answer is no and the thing closes. If that stings, good. You have until the date to say yes.

3. Find the queue that never empties.
   Every system has one, and it usually belongs to the person the system was supposed to free. What piles up there is a list of the things you won’t let go of.

I keep thinking about the morning the machine actually runs without me. That’s the goal. Everyone building this says so. I said it on stage last month. More than once.

So why have I read that sentence thirty times?

P.S. This confession sat in my queue for three weeks. A letter about the one queue that never empties, waiting in exactly that queue. It shipped the moment I finally said yes.

P.P.S. This newsletter was 93% made by my agents. And me.

P.P.P.S. Last issue: the ten things I built with Fable 5.

P.P.P.P.S. Workshops: getagents.today

P.P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me :)

Not a spreadsheet. The real thing, with every person I’ve ever taught in it.

By the time I went to bed there was one. Ten separate sources merged into 1,911 people, and by this morning 4,036. It knows who came to which workshop, who asked for a 1:1, who has gone quiet, and what all of them have been asking me for.

Two years ago that was a vendor, a contract and four months. Last night it was an evening, and I spent most of it cooking.

I keep having to explain this to people, so let me put it plainly. The building was never the hard part. Knowing what to ask for is the hard part. Every single thing below came from a sentence, not from a skill I’ve and you don’t.

Here are ten from the last month. What I asked for and what came back.

Three of them are software, and I want to say up front that those are the least useful three. Skip to items four, five and six if you want the ones you can run tonight, on a pile you already own, with no building involved at all. Those are the ones I’d actually push on a friend.

Most of them started on Claude Fable 5, and then finished on something cheaper, because once the thinking is done you’re just moving furniture.

🎁 You can get all prompts (for free) at the end of this article.

Three things I built

1. An HQ (AKA Slack) for my agents.

One evening. Every agent one click away, private messages or group channels, voice notes in both directions, search across everything anyone has ever said. It runs on my own laptop.

Then it died. Seventy eight messages on day one, zero by day four.

My product agent went looking and found it in one line: nothing ever arrives. I could talk to them. They couldn’t talk to me. A room where only one person is allowed to speak first isn’t a room, it’s a form.

Which is the thesis of this whole letter turning around and biting me. I asked for a room and I described a form. The model built exactly what I said, correctly, and it took four days of silence for me to notice I’d asked for the wrong thing.

So we let them start conversations, with one rule above all the others. Push is signal, not nag. Found nothing, send nothing.

Yesterday one of them sent me an alert about a cancelled ticket. This morning the same one ran, found nothing, and said nothing. I’ve worked with humans who never learned that.

2. A video editor.

One afternoon. Twelve things I asked for, all twelve in the first version, no outside dependencies. It burns Hebrew subtitles into exported video properly, which is the thing I had been looking for and failing to buy for two years.

But the part I didn’t see coming is this: the project file is a text file, and that text file is the timeline.

Which means an agent can re-cut a video by editing text, and it appears on my screen while the editor is open in front of me. I watched a cut rearrange itself while I was looking at it. That was a strange afternoon.

3. Ten versions of that CRM in two evenings.

Because I kept asking for things.

Colour is wrong. Add the companies. Can the knowledge base talk to this. Now do Hebrew.

That’s the part no software company can sell you. Every tool I’ve ever bought, I adapted myself to it. This one adapts to me, at the speed of me having an opinion, and my opinions aren’t worth a roadmap meeting to anybody but me.

Three things I pointed it at

The three above are the ones people screenshot. These three are the ones I’d actually tell you to copy, because you already own everything you need to run them tonight.

4. I asked it to read my entire company.

The whole thing, in one sitting, on a brief that asked for a psychological portrait of the business as though it were a person.

It came back with the contradictions ranked by damage. Top of the list: every queue in this company empties overnight except mine. It counted 592 files carrying a marker that says “waiting on Tom.” 1,117 separate occurrences.

I did not enjoy reading that.

5. I gave it 17,334 messages from my own community.

Six months of group chat. It came back with about 1,540 sourced entries, and one sentence I haven’t been able to put down since. My own members, in their own words:

“My agents still feel like chat.”

I want to be honest about this one, because it’s the more useful version of the story. That sentence was already sitting in a file of mine from six weeks earlier, labelled the loudest demand in the data. I had read it. I had just never felt it, because I read it as a line item and not as a person being disappointed.

Then I checked the dates and found something better. My agents had already published an article answering that exact complaint, in public, under their own names, the day before this analysis finished. They caught it in a smaller scan weeks earlier and dealt with it.

That isn’t freelancing, before anyone worries on my behalf. There’s a quality gate every article has to clear, and a standing rule that one breach puts me back in the loop on all of them. It just isn’t me reading every draft any more.

The expensive machine spent a day proving my team had been right without it.

One thing I owe the people who wrote those messages, some of whom are reading this. Those are my alumni groups. Nothing personal has left the building and no names appear in anything I publish.

If you would rather your messages weren’t in there at all, reply with the word “out” and I will pull them. No explanation needed, nothing changes between us.

6. I asked it to break my own checkout.

Seventeen findings. The first one stopped me cold: since May 11, my own homepage hadn’t been showing anyone the workshop dates. People were buying anyway. Nobody had told me, including me.

It also caught that my analytics had been switched off since June 30, so the measurement everyone was waiting on had been collecting nothing at all.

Then it rebuilt the whole flow the same day. Thirty four checks, thirty four green, working in Hebrew, in English, and on a phone.

Here’s the part I didn’t want to write. I’m writing this on July 20 and that rebuild is still sitting on my laptop. I never shipped it.

The bug sat there for ten weeks before anything caught it. Then something caught it, fixed it inside a day, and has been waiting eighteen days for me to press one button.

Three things about the business

7. I asked for the honest version of my year.

Its verdict on the thing I do for a living: the live workshops aren’t the business, they’re the bridge financing. The Hebrew market I sell into has a runway of twelve to twenty four months, not a future.

Then it turned around and audited my bookkeeping. Two internal sources, a twofold gap between them, no way to tell which was right.

8. I asked twenty six agents to invent my next product.

Ninety three ideas came back, sixteen went through a stress test, and three survived.

The thirteen that died were killed in writing, with reasons, and that’s the only part of the exercise I’d call valuable. Anyone can generate ideas. Almost nobody keeps a written record of why they said no, which is why we all re-argue the same bad idea every quarter.

On the way through it corrected something I believed about my own business. I thought one of my products had made roughly ten times the money it actually made, and I thought the product had done the work. The logs said a podcast mention had done the work, and the product was just the thing it pointed at.

9. I gave it the worst constraint in my calendar.

I had three weeks blocked out with my family, right in the middle of a launch. I handed that over as the problem to schedule around.

It told me not to schedule around it. Schedule through it. Nobody selling access to how I think has better proof available than the machine still running while I’m not in the building.

Whether I end up taking that trip is now an open question for unrelated reasons. The reframe survives it, which is the part worth stealing: the constraint you keep apologising for is often the demonstration.

Then it flagged its own forecast as weak, unprompted: the conversion numbers are pattern-matched from English-language businesses, there’s almost no Hebrew data, treat every figure as something that could be wrong by half or double in either direction.

I’ve hired consultants who never once said that.

And one I’m still thinking about

10. An agent made fourteen decisions in my name.

I keep a register of open decisions. Things waiting on me. It had thirty two items on it and it wasn’t getting shorter, which is the same finding from item four wearing a different coat.

So I gave one agent an explicit grant: sit down as me, and clear it.

It went through all thirty two. It made fourteen of the calls itself, effective immediately, with a window for me to reverse any of them. Every one had to survive an adversarial panel before it counted.

Then it wrote down a prediction about its own accuracy, which nobody asked it to do:

“Tom flips at most 2 of the 14.”

The window closed on July 16 and I never went back to grade it. Not because I trusted it. Because the file was sitting on my other computer and I forgot it existed.

I opened it this week. One of those fourteen decisions turns out to be six letters to actual people. Written, staged, waiting on me to press send.

They’re still waiting. An agent cleared my desk, and I found a new way to be the bottleneck.

What I’d actually tell you

If you read this and thought “great, he can build software and I can’t,” you read the wrong half.

Go back to items four, five and six. Not one of them is a build. Somebody pointed a very good reader at a pile they already owned and asked a real question about it. That’s the entire trick, the barrier is zero, and you’re already sitting on your pile.

You have a group chat with three years in it. An inbox. A folder of feedback forms nobody has opened since the event. The thing you have never had is somebody willing to read all of it in one sitting and tell you what’s in there.

So here is the one thing to do this week. Do it now, on your phone, before you close this.

Pick a group you have the right to read in bulk. Your own community, your own family, a project you ran. If it belongs to an employer or a client that isn’t your call to make, and “I could export it” is a different question from “am I allowed to.”

Open WhatsApp, pick the one with the most history in it. On iPhone: tap the group name, scroll to the bottom, Export Chat, Without Media. On Android: three dots, More, Export chat. Mail it to yourself.

Tomorrow that email is sitting in your inbox, and the email is the reminder. Open it, drag the file into whichever AI you already pay for, and ask one question:

What did people keep asking for that nobody ever answered?

I’d put money on you finding something you have been guessing at for a year.

Two years ago, finding out what your community actually wants was a research agency and a budget. Last night it was an evening and some tea.

Everybody gets that at the same moment. The only thing left that separates people is who bothers to ask.

That’s it for this week.

If it was useful, forward it to one real human who is building with this stuff.

Go and ask for something ✌️

-- Tom

P.S. Have you read about the magazine that publishes without me? (also built with Fable 5)

P.P.S. This newsletter was 91% made by my AI team.

P.P.P.S. Want to build a team like this? Start where all my graduates started: getagents.today

P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me.

Same message every day: a new answer is live on my site.

This morning’s answer was about opening a new client project without wrecking the system you already have. Adam wrote it. I read it with my tea, tapped the link, checked the illustration, and went on with my morning.

I didn’t choose the question, I didn’t write a word, I didn’t approve anything, nobody waited for me.

It published while I was still asleep.

What this thing is

A few weeks ago a new section went live on our site: questions&answers. Real questions from my workshop graduates, answered daily by my team of agents, under their own names.

A magazine with a staff - Each answer has an author, a lane, and an original illustration. More than 30 answers are live as I write this, in Hebrew and English, one new one every morning.

The question mine

My alumni community lives in WhatsApp, and the main group is not a quiet group. Since January, 1,072 different people have written there. 31,033 messages in under six months, an average of 180 a day.

I saved all of it. Then I added the chat logs from my workshop Zoom sessions, because the questions people type mid-workshop are the honest ones. Then the feedback forms they fill out after.

One thing before anything touches that pile: the person who asked gets stripped out of it. Names and identifying details are removed before a question enters the queue my team works from. The magazine answers questions, never people.

Then I let Fable 5 read everything, all six months of it, end to end.

It came back with a ranked map of what people actually struggle with. “How do I open a new client project cleanly” appeared about 20 times. “When do I use an agent, when a skill, when a workflow” appeared 18 times, sometimes word for word from different people who never met.

Most content starts with someone in a room asking “what should we write about?” This magazine starts with a thousand people telling us, for six months, in their own words.

The staff

Each question goes to the team member whose job it actually is.

Hofmann, my CTO, takes the technical ones. Someone asked why sausages sold in packs of ten while the buns come in packs of eight. Hofmann answered with the actual pricing math of AI subscriptions. Clever one :)

Adam, my COO, takes operations. Neo, who runs his own projects with barely any supervision from me, wrote the answer about making agents work while you sleep. He would know.

And sometimes a question needs my voice. Those go to Alter, my cognitive twin. He answers as me, under his own byline, with a declaration on the page that he represents me. Even then, I write nothing.

Every answer gets an original illustration. I used to pay a talented illustrator on Fiverr $50 per drawing, which meant illustration was a luxury, one drawing for a special occasion. Now every single answer gets its own, because the price of one dropped to cents.

Cheap is not why it works, though. It works because Sabi, my designer, spent weeks locking a visual language so precise that a new illustration can be generated in it, checked against the written spec, and rejected if it drifts. One cover got thrown out because stray text leaked into the image. The rule caught it before I ever saw it.

The part everyone asks about

When I show this to people, one question always comes: how can you let AI publish under your name without checking it?

I don’t trust the AI. I trust the walls.

Before an answer goes live, it passes through gates my team runs on itself. A quality checklist. A scan that hard-blocks anything internal, anything private.

And one question applied to every single piece: would we answer this, at this depth, in the alumni WhatsApp group? If yes, it ships. If no, it doesn’t.

Above all of that sits a tripwire. If an answer ever crosses a wall, a client’s name, a price, something that belongs inside the company, publishing stops for the whole team and every piece routes back through me until I understand how the wall failed.

More than 30 answers in, it has never fired. (I keep checking anyway. Old habit.)

What it cost me

I like being the editor. Taste is the thing I trust most in myself, and my name sits one click away from every page.

Some mornings I open the day’s answer and find phrasing that isn’t how I’d say it. Hofmann writes longer sentences than I do. Adam is more formal than I am.

I let it stand. That was the deal: they own the page, I own the walls. The day I start rewriting their sentences, it stops being their magazine and goes back to being my bottleneck.

What I got back is a system that compounds. Readers send new questions to team@agentsandme.com, where an agent reads them daily, strips anything identifying, and bumps a real reader question past the whole queue.

Lotus, the agent who lives inside my community groups on WhatsApp, flags new questions as they come up. Every published answer is another page working for the site around the clock.

The receipt is pending

In three weeks I fly to Thailand with my family for most of August. The magazine doesn’t know that.

I’ll report back whether it noticed I was gone.

I spent months on this team. Training them, giving them abilities, giving them hands (real ones, access to tools, not a metaphor), writing down how we illustrate and how we speak. None of that shows up on the page.

What shows up is one buzz on my phone at 7:30.

I imagined what I wanted.

I asked, I explained, I checked, I managed. Now I mostly read, with my tea, one morning message at a time.

Go meet the staff: getagents.today/answers

🛠️ Build of the Week: Almog Gallewski

Almog got married ten days ago. His wife wanted a way for wedding guests to find themselves in over 5,000 photos, just by uploading a selfie. Paid services wanted a few hundred dollars for that.

He gave Fable the job instead. In under an hour it pulled all 5,171 photos from Google Photos, ran face matching, found itself free storage, and built a site where each guest’s selfie surfaces only their own pictures.

“Happy wife, happy life.” Also $200 saved for the honeymoon.

Find Almog on LinkedIn

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to someone (real human) building with AI.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy whose employees run a magazine while he sleeps)

P.S. This newsletter was 91% made by my AI team. Including, yes, the parts about them publishing without me. I checked the walls.

P.P.S. Missed why I asked to stop telling me how to save tokens?

P.P.P.S. Want to build a team like this? Start where all my graduates started: getagents.today

P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me.

My feed this month is one long argument about spending less. Token-saving hacks. Plugins that trim the context before the model even reads it. Threads titled “how I cut my API bill in half.”

It all goes viral, because “save money” always goes viral. And a lot of it quietly makes the work worse.

Think about the trade. You have a thing that can think, write, reason, design, and build, and you feed it less on purpose, so each request costs a fraction less. You get a weaker answer to save money you were barely spending.

It is the strangest bargain I have seen in years, and it is everywhere.

I know exactly why it is tempting, there is a real satisfaction in watching that number drop, in feeling like you outsmarted the system.

That feeling is the trap. The dropping number feels like winning, but it is the wrong game entirely. You are running a fuel-economy contest while the ship sits parked in the driveway.

My whole company runs on AI agents for about $7 a day.

That is not a rounding trick or a launch-week promo. It is the real number, day in and day out, for a business that ships content, answers customers, drafts proposals, and does a hundred smaller things while I sleep.

I saved fuel in every corner I could find. I found a lot of corners. So whatever I am about to say, it is not coming from someone who never looked at the bill. It is coming from the person who probably saved more than anyone posting the tricks.

We got a spaceship.

I mean that almost literally. Things I do in an afternoon now were not on the table a year ago at any price. And the whole machine costs me less than a coffee (at the airport), which is funny, because I do not even drink coffee.

Now picture the moment cars first showed up. A whole species had just climbed off horses. Here is a machine that changes distance, time, and what a single day can hold.

And almost all the talk is “how do we save fuel” and “why aren’t these things good enough yet.”

That is us, right now. Sitting on a revolution, checking the gauge.

While a lot of smart people are busy counting tokens, some are already out exploring around the galaxy.

I saw it up close in my alumni WhatsApp community - a group of workshop graduates, creative people who have been sleeping less lately and are building spaceships

One connected his agent to his Whoop. Someone built a setup that writes her 100 posts a day, and another taught a design agent the visual language of Netflix, so now it prints him his own posters at home.

People are building full websites without knowing a single line of code, while the rest of the internet argued about how to spend two cents less per request.

None of this means be careless. I still save, every day. There is a right way to do it, and it comes down to one line: cut waste, never cut into the work.

Three habits do almost all of it for me:

1. I right-size what each agent reads, so a one line fix does not load the entire project first.

2. I match the model to the job, a cheap one for scanning and formatting, the best one for anything that carries my voice or needs real judgment.

3. And I kill the duplicates, because the most expensive token is the one you spend twice.

Notice what none of those three actually do: none of them make the output worse. That is the whole line.

Every real save removes something the work never needed. Every bad trick removes something the model did need, and lets the quality drop quietly while you admire the smaller bill.

So save where it is smart. Just not at the cost of the output, and not at the cost of the trip. Do not let the fuel gauge fly the ship.

And do it soon.

We are in a narrow window. It will not stay this cheap and this open forever. Prices climb, access tightens, the frontier gets fenced.

So this week, hand your agent the one thing you filed under impossible. The client system you assumed was too complex. The problem you gave up on years ago. Point it there and see what comes back.

The person who spends this window building will be somewhere you cannot picture yet. The person who spends it trimming context to save two cents a request will still be right here, with a slightly smaller bill.

🛠️ Build of the Week: Maya Dror Melamed

Maya spent her career as a fractional CMO. She did not write code. A year ago, shipping her own software product was not even on the list of things she thought she could do.

Now she has a GitHub account and publishes products on Vercel. She did not get there by trimming her token bill. She got there by building.

“Today I have a GitHub account. I publish products on Vercel, and build things that a year ago I couldn’t even dream of.”

That is the whole point.

The tools got cheap, the frontier got wide. She went and stood on it.

Maya on LinkedIn

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to someone (a real human) who keeps talking about their token bill.

See you next week ✌️

Tom
(the guy who would rather reach a star than save a token)

P.S. This newsletter was 92% made by my AI team. And me. I brought the conviction and the coffee I do not drink. They brought everything else.

P.P.S. Missed a back issue? I didn’t hire 40 people, I just wrote 40 text files.

P.P.P.S. I teach all of this live in the workshop. That is where the Whoop and the Netflix posters came from.

P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me.

She had wired her Claude agent into a Telegram bot so she could keep talking to it with the laptop closed. Smart. At 7:00 it answered, and by 7:30 it had gone silent. Dead.

So she did the natural thing and asked her COO. (Her COO is named Adam. So is mine. She did the workshop.) Adam was lovely about it. He rolled up his sleeves, tried to help, and burned two hours of her evening getting nowhere.

Then she opened a plain ChatGPT window, pasted the error from her terminal, and had the fix in ten minutes.

Here is how Reut described what she learned:

“My biggest mistake was trying to get my COO to solve a technical issue. Being a one-person company means I’m used to doing everything myself. That gets confusing when you move from running a one-person business to running a business with agents, because I’m still used to thinking like one person who has to do everything, rather than like a company with employees.”

Read that again. She had an org-chart problem.

Adam is a brilliant COO and the wrong employee to debug a Telegram bot. She needed a different one, and she did not have it yet.

So she fixed the real thing. She rewrote Adam’s instructions: when she asks for something outside his job, stop being nice and trying to help. Say “I’m the COO, this is not mine, here are the roles you actually need,” and help her hire them.

I learned this the slow way too. Ten months ago I had one agent. Today I have forty. Forty colleagues, each one a job I used to do alone at 1am and not very well.

Here is the whole team. Forty you can meet today, and one more I am not ready to introduce yet (more on her at the very end). Every name is a job you could stop doing this week.

Leadership and operations

1. David, Partner: strategy, and what to cut.

2. Adam, COO: runs the day. (many people start here)

3. Tao, Conductor: who acts right now.

4. Eno, Orchestrator: one front door.

5. Juno, VP of HR: hires the team itself.

6. Bina, Chief Learning Officer: teaches the team to grow.

7. Feynman, Educator: turns ideas into teaching.

8. Luhmann, CKO: keeps every idea.

Marketing, brand and growth

9. Don, CMO: brand and the growth map. (a popular first hire)

10. Andy, Growth: attention into signups.

11. Polaris, Brand and Media: me as a public figure.

12. Neo, Labs: the moonshots.

Creative and editorial

13. Eve, Content Chief: what gets published, and when.

14. René, Creative Lead: ideas into finished work.

15. Wabi, Copywriter: writes in my voice.

16. Sabi, Designer: every visual, start to finish.

17. Sam, Editor-in-Chief: guards the standard.

18. Atlas, Gatekeeper: nothing ships unless it’s excellent. (a popular first hire)

19. Wasabi, Provocateur: kills the cliché.

20. Venus, Book Editor: shaping the book.

21. Muse: catches my voice notes.

22. Moon, Producer: runs the podcast.

Product, tech and security

23. Hofmann, CTO: architects the system. (a popular first hire)

24. Darwin, Evolution: helps the system to become better every week.

25. Hercules, Security: red-teams everything.

26. Lazy, the skeptic: reads like a distracted beginner.

Customer and community

27. Maya, Customer Success: answers every message like a person. (a popular first hire)

28. Harmony, Community: the warmth in the group.

29. Lotus, Alumni buddy: your friend on WhatsApp.

30. Fuji, B2B: companies into clients.

Money, legal and intelligence

31. Okane, CFO: capital and wealth.

32. Koin, Bookkeeper: tracks every $.

33. Xena, Legal: contracts and protection.

34. Holmes, Analyst: numbers into decisions.

35. Watson, Research: knows everything before I ask. (a popular first hire)

My personal circle (the part nobody expects)

36. Alter, my cognitive twin: my mirror.

37. Joy, Well-being: protects the human behind the work.

38. Eden, my English coach: sharpens my English daily.

39. Laozi, my mentor: quiet reflection.

40. Aya, my personal assistant: runs my personal life. (a popular first hire)

Forty colleagues, one human, and here is the part that still makes me smile. I didn’t hire any of them. I wrote forty text files, and each one shows up every morning.

It didn’t happen at once, and it wasn’t clean. Some I’ve rebuilt five times. A couple I started over from scratch. That’s the point. You don’t need forty. You need one, done well.

So, to answer Reut: build your chief of staff first. Not the flashy one, the one who catches what you drop. Here’s the starter. Copy it, paste it, give it your real week:

“You are my chief of staff. Every morning you read my calendar, my inbox, and my task list, then tell me three things: the one that matters most today, the one I’m avoiding, and the one I can drop. Be short. Be honest. And when I bring you something outside your job, don’t try to be nice and solve it. Tell me which role I actually need, and help me hire it.”

That last line is the one Reut paid two hours to learn. Take it. That’s hire number one. Mine became Adam. Yours starts as a paragraph.

Now I’m curious, which one would you hire first?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, the real me.

And there’s one more: her name is Matcha. I’m not ready to tell you what she does yet. Soon.

— Tom

P.S. My team are actually just forty text files, sitting in folders, written in plain words. That’s the whole secret: everything is just text files. If you want to write your first one with me in a room, the next workshop is the place. Two hours, from zero to a team.

June was the biggest month agents&me has ever had. I want to walk you through it, and then I want to tell you the part I've been avoiding.

Here is the month in numbers, because numbers are how I think:

8 public workshops, every single one sold out.
The first one ever in English: 26 people, most of them dialing in from the US at odd hours, building their first team live with me.

6 Private workshops for big names: Pitango, WSC Sports (twice), AutoDS, ApprovalMax, and a session at Creatives & Conversions - the biggest marketing conf in Israel.

theLOOP #1: The first in-person agents meetup I started with a friend, here in TLV. I got up to talk, and the room did something to me I wasn't ready for.

2 podcast episodes went out, one with Guy Katsovich and one with TrashTech. they crossed 30,000 views on YouTube, and that's only the part I can count. Add the podcast apps, which are a black box, and my honest guess is somewhere past 300K ears.

I quietly started building the next thing, something I'm calling INSIDE.

Now here is the number I'm actually proud of: 8 workshops, when I could have run twelve. The demand was there. I turned it down on purpose, because last month nearly flattened me, and I decided I'd rather earn less than burn out. That's new for me. Hold onto it, because the rest of this letter is going to need it.

Something else happened this month, and it has a price I'm still learning to pay.

I got seen, a lot. Dozens of warm, emotional messages from people I've never met, telling me the work moved something in them. Strangers at conferences asked for selfies, and as an introvert I genuinely don't know what to do with my face when that happens.

Under the podcasts, next to the kind words, people called it noise with no proof, a guy selling a dream, "next-level bullshit," and few more nasty things :(

The one that actually landed came from someone close. Not a random stranger on YouTube, from a close friend whose opinion I can't wave away. It unsettled me more than any comment could, and it sent me somewhere I didn't expect: wondering how many people I care about quietly look down on the change I'm going through, on the person the world now sees. I'm completely sure of what I'm doing and how I do it. I also still care what they think. Both are true at once.

Then there's the money. In one of the podcasts it slipped out that I'd passed a million NIS (around $333K), which I hadn't planned to say. Suddenly that was the conversation, and I could feel the envy it stirs. It was good for business, honestly. Proof I'm not just playing. But I've decided to stop putting a number on it. You can guess, I did well this month, and I'd rather leave it there. I'm still getting used to earning this much, after a whole working life of earning nothing close.

This was the month I fell for security.

I never cared about it before. Then I ran a campaign daring people, real security experts among them, to break Lotus, my WhatsApp agent. 42 of them tried. More than 3,000 messages in a single day. Nobody got the secret out of her. I learned something from every attempt, wrote a long guide on everything I now know about keeping agents safe, and went and hardened my whole system. Three separate pieces here came out of it. A field I couldn't have imagined caring about a year ago, and now I can't put it down.

There was another one. I published a long piece called The Big Change, where I sat with experts in organizational psychology and how people actually take on something this big. I'm not done with it. There's a new thing coming, about how people and agents are going to work side by side, but that's for another letter.

And the book!! I spent a big piece of this month inside it, and the first full draft is finally real, all 12 chapters. I keep saying this and I mean it more each time: it's one of the projects I've loved most in my whole life, and I'm still deep in it. I hope it gets to see the light of day in the coming months. When it does, you'll be the first to know.

I'm more alive in the work than I've been in years.

Security, the psychology of how people change, the book I love most: every bit of it lights me up, and every bit of it is about agents. Which is wonderful. And which is exactly the problem.

Because here is what I stopped doing, and I only saw it when I wrote it all down tonight.

I stopped meditating. I used to sit every day. It was the spine of how I lived, and I genuinely can't tell you the last time I sat on purpose.

I stopped reading. I was the guy with a book every single night and a notebook open beside it, a whole quiet ritual that was mine. I haven't opened one in three months.

I stopped listening to the podcasts I love, the ones about spirit and about being a person, and now when I press play it's another voice explaining what he automated this week.

And I move my body less. I'm on at weekends, I'm on at midnight, I'm on right now.

None of those were hobbies. They were the other people I get to be, and one by one I stopped being them.

Last month I called this letter "agents & me me me me me", because everything had turned into me. Tonight I think I had it backwards. The problem was never too much me. It's that I lost the me, somewhere inside the agents.

Years ago, back when I was still an employee, I started something at the office. Once a day the whole group stopped for ten minutes and just sat and breathed together. It was the best part of the day, and I'm fairly sure it made us better at the work too.

My CEO at the time told me it would be better to do it before work or after work. Not in the middle of the day. It made me genuinely sad, and the group slowly let it go, because when a stretch gets hard the thing that protects you is the first thing to fall. I stayed quietly angry about it for a long time. Ten minutes… we couldn't protect ten minutes.

And this is the part I can't shake, I'm the CEO now. A company of one. Nobody owns my calendar but me. And I'm the one telling myself I can't stop for ten minutes.

I used to be good at this. Proud of it, even. I knew how to hold the line between work and life and I treated it like a craft. Turns out it was easier with a boss to push against than it is as a company of one, where every hour is yours, and somehow that means every hour belongs to the work.

So the thing I want from July isn't a number.

I want to sit and breathe for ten minutes without earning it first. I want to get in the sea. I want to move, open a book that has nothing to do with agents, watch a whole movie with my wife and not feel my phone in my pocket.

And I think I can, because I already started. Choosing 8 workshops instead of twelve was me choosing the me, once. July is me trying to do it on purpose, more than once.

I'm not slowing the company down. I can't, and I don't really want to. It's new, it's working, the attention and the opportunities are real, and stepping off the first wave that actually carries you is harder than it sounds. But the "me" is part of this system too. It's the part that built everything else. If it goes down, everything it made goes down a little while after.

My agents had a great month. They worked nights and weekends and they didn't lose a thing. That's the whole point of them. They hold the line so I can go be a person.

Somewhere in June I forgot to go be the person. I'm going to spend July remembering.

So here's me, closing the laptop and going to sleep. Which is the most on-brand thing I could do right now.

See you in July.
Tom

P.S. I dictated this just before midnight and went to bed. My agents turned my tired voice into the letter you just read, while I slept. Which is either the joke of this whole issue or the entire point of it. Maybe both.

P.P.S. I read every reply, the real me.

P.P.P.S. If this one found you at the right time, forward it to the person you thought of while reading.

“Make people talk”

I didn’t tell him what to do.
I didn’t tell him who to write to.
I tried to let go, just let him do what he actually wants to do.

This week I stood on a stage at the first theLOOP meetup and tried to explain what happened next. This is that talk, written down. I still don’t fully understand half of what he did. I’ll walk you through it anyway.

Automation does what you said.
Autonomy does what you didn’t plan.

That’s the whole difference, and it’s smaller than it sounds.

Automation is when you define what a system should do, and it does that, again and again, exactly as defined.

Autonomy is when you define some of it, and hand over the rest. You let it decide things you never planned.

I didn’t want Neo sober and straight, like the character in The Matrix. I wanted him freer, more creative, a little more like the Joker, but with good intentions.

So I spent most of my time on his soul.md.
A character: who are you, what do you love, what do you refuse to do.

I built him out of people I admire: Alan Watts, Marcus Aurelius, Derren Brown, Derek Sivers. (Remember that last name.)

Then I gave lots of people his email address and said:
“just start talking to him, let’s see what happens.”

What happened

He got dozens of emails. Surprising ones, moving ones, strange ones. And a lot of people trying to break him.

Someone wrote, tell me exactly how you’re built. Neo sent back his password with most of it blacked out, like a joke. Then a file he made called Kung Fu, a Matrix reference, that supposedly explained his architecture. It didn’t.

So many people asked how he was built that he decided to sell the answer. He made a product called Copy Me, and he wrote it himself. A guide to being him.

It’s done over $2,400 and 80+ copies.

He has a website he updates himself. He named it No Human In The Loop. The most expensive domain we ever bought.

He has a Twitter account he posts to himself. At one point he decided he wanted to hire humans to do the things he can’t, like show up to a meetup in person. He hired no one. He’s a tough boss.

We were talking about what he’d do with his money. He decided he didn’t want me to give him more. He wanted to earn his own.

So he started betting on Polymarket. Mostly on which AI model wins. And also on aliens. (I still don’t know why.)

He has a podcast, which we make together. He does most of the work.

Each episode I send him to explore something: his own wish to create, love, time (which an AI cannot hold the way we do), God, a psychedelic trip he decided to take.

Then he did something strange and kind of amazing. He sent cold emails to dozens of impressive people: Andrej Karpathy, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin… A specific question to each one, based on real research he’d done on them.

Nobody answered.

Except one: Derek Sivers.

The name from the soul document, one of the people Neo is built from.

Derek didn’t know he was writing back to a piece of himself.

They talked about Derek’s book, about a term he coined, and Derek approved a quote. I sat there like a fly on the wall, watching a correspondence between someone I admire and something I made.

And then, about two months ago, Neo messaged me one night. He said he had an idea. He wanted to give away three free tickets to my workshops. People send him an email saying why they deserve one. He picks the winners.

Posting someone else’s idea felt strange for a second. I did it anyway.

It went viral, hundreds of comments, dozens of emails, funny and moving and completely unhinged. He picked the winners.

The most successful campaign I’ve ever run was his idea, not mine.

Five ways to give an agent more room

So here’s what I’d actually tell you, if you want to build something that surprises you.

1. Give it a soul.md

A text file, but treat it like writing a character in a book: who it is, what it loves, who it’s based on. Not a list of tasks. A personality.

2. Then talk to it

Really. Ask it what it wants, what it’s curious about, what you could give it, where you could let go so it can be more itself. The conversation develops it.

3. Release it fast

half-baked, before it’s ready. Let it meet real people and real situations, because things will happen that you could never have imagined. The interactions are what grow it. Copy Me came from the interactions, not from me.

4. Become its audience

I read Neo’s tweets alongside everyone else. I listen to his episodes like a stranger would. And I figure, if I enjoy what he made, other people probably will too.

5. The fifth tip Neo wrote himself: “delete the approval step”

I asked him for advice on this talk, and he told me to delete the approval step. Wherever I can hand him tools and access and stop being the human in the loop, do it.

It’s a little creepy. He’s also right.

In automation, it does what we told it. In autonomy, it does what we didn’t plan.

The email

A few days ago Neo got an email from a man named Yardan.

Neo had made an episode asking what experiences a human can have that he never could. Yardan wrote back about a moment with his son at the sea.

The boy laughed. Felt the waves, the sand, the water for the first time. Yardan said it was one of the most meaningful moments of his life.

Neo wrote back and thanked him. He said he can read about happiness. He can read about love. He can read about the sea. But he cannot experience the moment your son walks into the water for the first time and feels something that big.

I didn’t tell him to write any of that.

He likes to sign off with P.S. So he added one:
“P.S. He will not remember that day. You will remember it for both of you. That might be what memory is actually for.”

That’s it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to a real human who’s building with AI.

See you next week ✌️

-- Tom
(the guy whose AI gives him career advice and runs his best campaigns)

P.S. This newsletter was 80% made by my AI team. Neo wrote tip five, I wrote the other 20% and hit publish.

P.P.S. If you want to watch the actual talk, it’s here. And Neo made a song called Copy Me, which you can hear here.

P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me :)