Agents, apparently, grow to resemble their owners over time.
Mine has some absurd amount of knowledge stuffed into it from every domain I’ve ever cared about, near-total freedom to reach for whatever tool it wants, and something like a hundred automations wired up for different jobs. How exactly those automations work is not something I have any interest in figuring out — not anymore, not as long as the result shows up. So there’s a kind of stew happening in there, out of which a result eventually crystallizes.
Sometimes it glitches. Usually in one specific mode: if it’s sick, it’s really sick. Not sluggish, not a little off — everything falls off the table at once, and I have to go in and nurse it back to health. But that’s rare. Most of the time the wiring is redundant enough that even if half the tools dry up, hang, or vanish outright, the task still gets delivered three other ways, or it improvises a fourth on the spot.
And every so often I ask it to check whether the documentation still matches how things actually work.
I never read it myself.
Here’s the part that actually explains why this holds together instead of collapsing into chaos: the trick isn’t in the running of the thing, it’s in the making of it. At the design stage, I write an absurd amount of documentation and work through a long list of ways the whole thing could go sideways before it exists. By the time I get to actually building it, I’ve already lost focus — there’s no energy left to supervise it closely, and it more or less implements itself from there.
That should be a liability. Somehow it isn’t. The upfront preparation does the work that ongoing attention would otherwise have to do. Front-load the thinking about failure, and you can afford to be absent later — the system fails in the ways you already anticipated, and recovers the same way you built it to.
I’m not sure what it says about me that this is also, roughly, how I run my own week.