The Ideabro Brief #6: an agent ran my inbox (and booked the dentist)
Confession: for one week, some of my emails were sent by software.
I gave an email agent my inbox with strict rules. Read and draft for three days, then send in three low-risk categories. It archived 287 emails I never opened, sent 31 replies on its own and accepted a dentist appointment for a morning when I'd be on a plane. The agent wasn't wrong about my calendar. My calendar was wrong about my life.
The full Field Notes are this week's lead, along with two prompts that would have saved me: the agent receipt, which makes software account for what it did, and the brief-back, which makes it repeat the job before starting.
And Theo talks to the founder of a nine-person studio with fourteen rules on a wall titled "Things agents may not do".
— Maya
Seven days, 412 emails and one near-disaster with a dentist. What happened when our editor-in-chief let an email agent sort, draft and send on her behalf.
by Maya Okafor
Agents are optimistic narrators. Today's prompt makes them account for what they did, what they skipped and what they assumed, in five short sections you can read in forty seconds.
by Jonah Kim
An old classroom trick for modern models: before any big task, ask the AI to restate the job, flag its risky assumptions and ask you three questions.
by Jonah Kim
The founder of Northpaw Studio ships client software with nine people and a bench of agents. She talks pricing, hiring, taste and the day an agent nearly lost them their biggest client.
by Theo Brooks
Fluent isn't the same as true. A simple, repeatable routine and a table of red flags for catching most of the AI mistakes that matter.
by Dev Raman
The short version of this week's most-copied prompt. Add it to the end of any task you hand to an agent.
Before you tell me you're finished, write a receipt:
DID: what you changed, with counts
DIDN'T: what you skipped, and why
ASSUMED: anything you decided without asking me
CHECK: the two places I should look first
UNDO: how to reverse this
After the dentist incident, my agent now has a curfew: nothing sent after 6 p.m., and nothing that mentions a date without asking me first. It's a better colleague for it. So, possibly, am I.
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