Stop Being the Middleman

Your AI agents all work. Your Monday is longer than it was in July.

Five Bots. Five outputs a week. Every one of them accurate, and not one of them finished, because every one produces something that still needs a human decision, and there is one human.

That is the second month with an AI teammate, and almost nobody warns you about it. The first month is easy: get one thing working. The second month is where you find out that handing over a task and keeping the judgment is not delegation. It is preparation, and preparation stacks.

Stop Being the Middleman is for the reader who already got value once and has since become the bottleneck. Fourteen chapters, fourteen small written artifacts, one page at the end you could hand to somebody else.

You will learn how to tell which work can leave your desk and which cannot, using four questions that take ninety seconds per job. How to write a six-part specification and keep it outside the product, because the product is a runtime and not a repository. What the difference actually is between a skill, a routine, a connector and computer use, in a comparison table that exists nowhere else. How to price a trigger design in runs per week before you choose it. How to break your own routine on purpose, on a Tuesday afternoon, to find out whether the failure path you designed actually fires.

And the two chapters that cost the most to leave out of every other guide. A complete failure taxonomy with four shapes and a detection method for each, all of which work without an audit view, because there is not one. And a cost chapter built on the place the employment metaphor breaks: a person with nothing to do stops costing you, and this does not.

Then the roster. How nine Bots happen to a careful person in six weeks, the five legitimate reasons to add one, and the column that decides which four survive.

Written from the official documentation, read in full, and from using the product daily. Every claim about what the product is comes from a vendor page. Every claim about what other people ran into is dated and marked as such. Two of the best ideas in the book came from a stranger on a support forum and are credited to him in the text, not buried in a note.

No plan tables. No prices. No usage figures. Each of those changed while the book was being written. What you get instead is a method for reading your own meter, and a dated errata page for everything else.