Applied agents · operations
Running the back office with AI agents
Marketing, content, ads, follow-ups — a small company's whole back office, restructured as a crew of specialised agents with a human at the desk.
§01The problem
A small product company needs the output of six departments with the headcount of one. Content calendars, ad campaigns, market monitoring, follow-up sequences — each is a part-time job, and the founder-shaped person doing all of them context-switches until nothing gets done well.
Generic 'AI assistant' usage doesn't fix this: a chat window is a very smart intern with amnesia. The work needs roles, memory, standards, and handoffs — the things that make a department a department.
§02The thinking
The design borrows from management, not engineering: define narrow roles with clear briefs (research, copy, creative, distribution), give each agent standing instructions and examples of 'good', and route work through review gates where a human approves before anything external happens.
The interesting product problems were coordination problems: what does one agent hand the next, in what format, with what quality bar? The answer was artifact-shaped: every agent produces a named, inspectable artifact — a brief, a draft, a creative set — that the next stage consumes. Artifacts make the invisible pipeline auditable.
The human's job compresses into two verbs: brief and approve. Everything between is delegated — but nothing crosses the company boundary without human sign-off, because agents amplify judgment; they don't replace accountability.
+ Role-specialised agents with standing briefs
− one general assistant prompted ad hoc
# consistency comes from constraints; a role with examples of 'good' outperforms a genius with amnesia.
+ Artifact handoffs between stages
− free-form agent chatter
# named artifacts make quality inspectable and failures debuggable — you can see exactly which desk dropped the ball.
+ Human approval at the boundary
− end-to-end autonomy
# external actions carry reputation; the approval gate costs seconds and prevents the one disaster that undoes months.
§03What shipped
The system runs as a pipeline of desks: a research agent produces market briefs, content agents turn briefs into drafts and creatives, a distribution agent packages and schedules — and every externally visible artifact pauses at a human approval gate. One person operates what previously required a team, without the output reading like a machine made it.
§04Outcomes
One human, six desks
sustained multi-channel output without new headcount
Debuggable delegation
artifact handoffs show exactly where quality slipped
Nothing ships unseen
external actions always pass a human gate
§05Reflection
Operating this system made me a sharper judge of the agent hype cycle. Agents are leverage, not employees; the management layer — roles, artifacts, gates — is where the real product design lives. Companies that skip it get impressive demos and embarrassing incidents.
$ cat takeaways.txt
- ✓ Design agent systems like org charts: roles, briefs, handoffs, reviews.
- ✓ Artifacts over chatter — inspectable outputs make delegation debuggable.
- ✓ Autonomy at the core, accountability at the boundary.