An agent is a chat that can take steps. Watch, approve, or walk away on purpose. Check the work without being an engineer.
- 1 What an agent is (plain English) Nora asked a work chat to clean up the Q2 folder and came back to 40 renamed files and a deleted zip she still needed. An agent is a chat that can take steps in a loop until a goal, not a smarter paragraph generator. Scheduled · September 7, 2026
- 2 Chat vs agent vs work mode vs coding agent Ellis flipped on a work mode to tighten one paragraph. It started sorting a 62-file folder. This part names four doors sold as AI (chat, a general agent, work or Cowork on your files, a coding agent in a repo) so you pick by the artifact, not the logo. Scheduled · September 10, 2026
- 3 Autonomy levels: watch, approve, walk away Farah walked away for 11 minutes and the agent sent a client recap because send looked like save. Pick a supervision level on purpose: watch while it acts, approve before irreversible steps, and walk away only for work you can undo. Scheduled · September 11, 2026
- 4 Loops, retries, and runaway tasks Ben’s agent retried a failed vendor download 23 times and filled Downloads with 3.9 GB of partial zips while he made coffee. Cap steps, time, and spend, watch the first loop, and keep Stop in reach with send and delete off. Scheduled · September 12, 2026
- 5 Checking agent work without being an engineer Imani's agent cleaned an 18-slide board deck overnight, and slide 4 still said $4.2M because it copied last year's title. Spot-check the artifacts: open the files, click the links, recompute one number, search a name you know is sensitive, and ask what it deleted. Scheduled · September 13, 2026