Before you hand a job to an agent, work through this.

What you get, and what it saves you

• The nine questions before you build. What the agent can see, what it can do, who approves what, and what it does when it is unsure. Answer these and the build takes days instead of months.
• Agent, automation, or neither. A decision tree for the three cases. Most workflows people describe as agent work are a rule with extra steps.
• Where the human signs. The approval thresholds real operators set — dollar amounts, customer-facing actions, anything irreversible — and why the default should be tighter than you think.
• The failure log. What goes wrong in the first month, taken from real deployments, and the check that catches each one before a customer sees it.