built a standing-order agent exactly like the third one described here and it was brilliant for about four days — then it started confidently routing things to the wrong place because my workflow had shifted and the agent was still operating on last week's instructions. the real discipline isn't building one, it's maintaining the brief as a living document. most people skip that part until the agent breaks silently
Good catch from Cyril on the access question. I'd add the practical version for anyone non-technical reading this: before you connect an agent to anything real (calendar, invoices, docs), ask what it can see and delete, not just what it can do for you. The "it asks before deleting" safeguard mentioned here is reassuring, but only for the tools smart enough to ask.
The "one repeatable task and an afternoon" framing is honest and refreshing, but it skips the part that bites you two weeks later: what those agents can access. When you hand a no-code agent credentials to your CRM, calendar, or internal docs, you've just created an identity with persistent access and zero audit trail. The speed of building is real. So is the speed of exposure. I wrote about this exact blind spot recently. The model itself is not where the risk lives. The identities you grant (or forget you granted) to these agents are. Most teams building their first agent never think about scoping permissions, and that is where things go sideways fast.
Agreed - the first agent should replace a task you already do weekly, not a task you wish existed.
built a standing-order agent exactly like the third one described here and it was brilliant for about four days — then it started confidently routing things to the wrong place because my workflow had shifted and the agent was still operating on last week's instructions. the real discipline isn't building one, it's maintaining the brief as a living document. most people skip that part until the agent breaks silently
Good catch from Cyril on the access question. I'd add the practical version for anyone non-technical reading this: before you connect an agent to anything real (calendar, invoices, docs), ask what it can see and delete, not just what it can do for you. The "it asks before deleting" safeguard mentioned here is reassuring, but only for the tools smart enough to ask.
The "one repeatable task and an afternoon" framing is honest and refreshing, but it skips the part that bites you two weeks later: what those agents can access. When you hand a no-code agent credentials to your CRM, calendar, or internal docs, you've just created an identity with persistent access and zero audit trail. The speed of building is real. So is the speed of exposure. I wrote about this exact blind spot recently. The model itself is not where the risk lives. The identities you grant (or forget you granted) to these agents are. Most teams building their first agent never think about scoping permissions, and that is where things go sideways fast.
https://cyrilsimonnet.substack.com/p/the-model-was-never-the-attack-surface