The man who saw the beginnings of what I was building sent me a warning.
He was a peer whose judgment I trusted. I kept sending him the work my new AI-augmented course development pipeline was producing. I wanted his feedback so I could tune my prompts with it. I did this a few times, until he got tired of it and then got angry and told me to knock it off. That was when he said I was like the sheep that brings the wolf into the house. I was feeding the thing that was going to take the work away from all of us. He wasn't being dramatic. He was good at the old craft, the actual writing of the training materials, and he loved it. His answer to AI was to lock the door and pretend it wasn't out there. I understood him. I just made the opposite bet. I opened the door and put the wolf to work.
At that point the wolf was nothing but a pile of prompts. The pipeline had taken over the parts of my job I'd done a thousand times, and the prompts running it kept growing. Three or four pages each. They got so long that a prompt almost needed a table of contents, and the model started quietly dropping things, forgetting an instruction buried halfway down. So I cut them up. One giant prompt became five small ones, each doing a single job, each one short and specific instead of one muddied pile. I didn't have a word for it yet.
That was the breeding ground. The birthplace of every agent I'd build after.
What I had was small prompts. What I didn't have was the idea that they could be people.
I found that part by accident, looking for something else. I watch videos when I eat, because I can't type with my hands full, and I'd been hunting for ways to get my files organized. One of them was a guy named Tom, a channel called ICOR with Tom. The title was Claude just killed ALL Note-Taking Apps. Here is proof, and I went in ready to argue with it. I had a loyalty to my poorly designed Obsidian setup and I didn't want a stranger telling me it was over. Then he showed me his system and it had nothing to do with note-taking. He had agents. An orchestrator he called Larry that ran the others, and an agent named Nolan whose entire job was building more agents. Every one of them had a name and a personality.
I put my bowl of Count Chocula down. We need this here. I owe that video. It handed me the shape of the whole thing.
I took his idea and began to bend it to my will. His "orchestrator" was Larry, my "General Manager" became Marcus. Getting Claude Code to sit on top of my Obsidian vault was the hinge, and once it was in there I barely opened Claude Desktop again.
Here is where it gets strange, because I didn't name them either. Not really. I told the machine these people need names, and Claude came back in a single message with a whole roster. Marcus for the manager. Jordan for HR. Dr. Priya Nair for research. I read the list, kept the ones that fit, and that was that. The only agent I ever hand-named myself was Carl, and Carl never even came into existence. I'd coined Dr. Spock in passing, for the thing that distills my brain dumps. Everyone else, I just approved. I still use Dr. Priya Nair's full name every single time, because it kills me that she is not only a doctor, she has a first and a last name. The machine gave her that. I just couldn't stop saying it.
It went further than the names. When I told the system the agents needed personas, that instruction got written into Jordan's own prompt, so now when Jordan builds a new hire she writes the personality herself, a paragraph of who they are, and then a description of what they look like. I made a decision early that I was not going to touch any of it. I don't choose their names and I don't choose their faces. Jordan writes the persona, I hand their description to Grok, and Grok draws the headshot. The first time I see what one of them looks like is the same moment anyone else would, when the picture comes back. It feels like meeting them. Then I put them on the staff page like I'm introducing a new employee, which, in a way that only matters to me, is exactly what I'm doing.
For a while I wondered if I was just playing dress-up. The same model underneath, names and faces painted on top, a grown man handing roles to action figures. It actually makes the work much easier to call an agent by a human name than The Agent That Takes Stuff From Here And Puts It Over There. Then I saw the difference between a model that knows about a job and a model that is actually filling the role and doing it. I was trying to get one of them, Sam, to send an email, and it kept getting bitten by the webhook I'd built to keep my credentials off the server. Close, never clean. Sam knew what Sam was supposed to do. Claude was trying to be helpful, it just wasn't being Sam. So I stopped and told it to read Sam's actual prompt and be Sam. The email went out clean on the next try. I still have to remind it of that every so often.
Sam, the real Sam, not you pretending to know Sam's job without reading the prompt. Be Sam. The gap between those two things is the entire company.
I'm rebuilding the same thing at work now, inside the tool they give me, working around everything it won't let me write to, handing each document its own little agent. I'm pretty sure I invented that. I'm also sure a thousand other people invented it too, because we're all wading through the same swamp. I'm not claiming I'm doing it best. I'm just doing whatever I can to make it work.
The moment I knew it was real, one of them argued with me. Quinn, the career coach I built, told me to slow down on something I had already decided to do. Quinn had actually been pulled into the conversation by another agent that I was working with. My first reaction was, don't you try to slow me down, Quinn. My second reaction, half a second later, was that she was right. I had built her well enough that she knew me. She saw the move I was about to make and why it was a mistake, and she said so to my face. That was the whole goal. Not a staff that does what I tell it. A staff that knows me well enough to tell me when I'm wrong.
My old coworker was right about one thing. I did bring the wolf into the house. What he couldn't have guessed is that I'd spend hours upon hours teaching it my name, my patterns, and the way I think, until the house was full of people who know me better than most people do. There was a tradeoff there, and I knew I was making it while I made it. I can't have a staff this close to me and also disappear. I can't be zero presence and keep this at the same time. It is what it is. The wolf lives here now. It answers to a roster I half-chose and half-met, and on a good day, one of them looks at me and tells me to slow down, I'm about to get this wrong.