Jack of all trades, master of none
They think my 41 agents are a joke
I have 41 agents working for me.
A copywriter, a gatekeeper who flags every phrase I hate, a researcher, a bookkeeper, a security agent whose whole job is to break my own systems before a stranger does. Each one with a name, a role, and a file that makes it excellent at one thing. (Yeah. 41. I counted this morning.)
A lot of people think this is hilarious.
“It’s theatre.”
“It’s the same chatbot wearing 41 hats.”
“One super-agent will do all of that, why are you playing dress-up?”
I get some version of this every week, in DMs, after workshops, from smart people I respect. Half the room is wiring up one OpenClaw or Hermes agent to do everything and waiting for me to admit I overcomplicated the whole thing.
So let me start by agreeing with them.
The part nobody expects me to say
The super-agent everyone wants already exists. It’s the model.
My 41 specialists are not 41 different AIs. They’re the same model, handed 41 different briefings.
The copywriter is the model reading my voice file. The bookkeeper is the model reading my numbers. Same engine, different context. One brain could, in theory, do all 41 jobs.
Which is either unsettling or kind of elegant, depending on the hour. Both, probably.
So the people laughing have a point. The question was never “is one agent capable.” It is. The real question is what you get when you ask one mind to be everything at once.
Here’s what you get.
Master of none
Back when it was one agent doing everything, I asked it for a LinkedIn post. It came back sounding a bit like a customer service email. Polite, correct, completely dead.
I looked at the instructions I’d handed it. Voice rules, brand guidelines, pricing strategy, competitor notes, product roadmap, workshop curriculum. Five thousand words of everything, in one place. It was pulling from my B2B pricing section while writing a personal story.
The post wasn’t bad, it was fine. And fine is the problem.
That’s the jack of all trades. Ask one mind to be a peak copywriter and a peak strategist and a peak bookkeeper in the same breath and you don’t get three peaks. You get the blurry middle.
(The saying is older and longer than the version people use to tease me. “Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than one.” It started as a compliment. But that was before you could hire 41 masters for the price of one.)
When I split that mega-agent into specialists, my copywriter’s whole instruction file dropped to about 400 words. How I write, what I sound like, what I never say. Nothing about pricing. Nothing about security.
And the difference between 400 focused words and 5,000 scattered ones is the difference between “fine” and “this thinks like me.”
But averaging isn’t even the real reason I run a team.
The one thing a single agent can never do
You cannot proofread your own writing at 2am. You read the sentence you meant to type, not the one on the screen. Your eyes slide right over the missing word. You know what you meant, so you read the intention instead of the page.
A single super-agent has the exact same problem. It can write the email, build the deck, draft the contract. The one thing it can never do is read its own work with fresh eyes. The mind that wrote the paragraph is the worst possible reader of that paragraph, for the same reason you’re the worst reader of your own midnight email.
You can’t prompt your way out of this. Fresh eyes isn’t a skill you bolt onto the instructions. It’s a position. It’s the gap between the one who made the thing and the one seeing it new, and the maker and the reviewer can’t be the same mind at the same moment, no matter how good the mind is.
That’s why the team wins. The smartest single agent in the world still can’t stand outside itself and look.
The rule you can use today
So here’s the line I give people now, instead of arguing.
Split an agent the moment you’d want a second person to check the first one’s work.
Not when the task gets big. Not when the model gets confused. The moment you’d want a second pair of eyes, you’ve found a seam, and you put two agents on either side of it. That’s the whole method.
And to be straight with you: not everyone needs this. If you just want something that answers questions and drafts the odd email, one agent is plenty. I’m not going to pretend you need 41 agents to send a calendar invite.
But if you’re running something real, where your week spans marketing and operations and content and money and the thing that keeps you up at night, then one agent doing all of it is one employee doing all of it. You already know how that ends. Not in disaster, in “fine.”
How it actually works
The build is simpler than the org chart looks. Two layers.
An agent is an employee. A role, a domain, a short file that makes them excellent at one thing.
A skill is a playbook. The how-to for one task inside that domain.
When my copywriter writes a newsletter, she loads the newsletter playbook. When she writes a thread, a different one. The newsletter rules don’t exist in that moment.
You break the knowledge into files and load the right file at the right moment. Everything is just text files. That’s the whole system.
Which side you’re on
For years my instinct was the opposite of all this. One person, do everything, prove you don’t need help. Splitting the work felt like admitting I wasn’t enough.
It isn’t. Watch what an org chart actually does. It puts the writer next to the editor so the work gets read by someone who didn’t write it. It puts the builder next to the reviewer so nothing ships unseen.
You’re the CEO now. The job was never finding the one perfect agent. It’s knowing where to put the seams.
An org chart is not a confession of weakness. It’s a multiplier of focus.
So they can keep their one super-agent doing everything. A little impressive, a little sad, like watching one person try to be a whole company. I’ll take the team of masters. 41 of them, and counting.
That’s it for this week.
If someone you know is still doing everything in one chat window, forward this to them. That’s the person this was written for.
See you next week.
-- Tom
You lead, they execute. You stay in the loop.
P.S. My agents wrote most of this issue. I wrote the rest, and I read it last, with the fresh eyes none of them have. The number changes every week because the work changes every week.
P.P.S. Want to build your own team instead of one overworked agent? I teach the whole workflow in one online session, from zero to running. Details at getagents.today.
P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me, not the AI. So tell me: what’s the one job you’d never let a single agent do alone? I’ll write back.