Sunday morning, I realised the next improvement wasn’t another agent.

Man and Machine: The Week I Stopped Adding

I looked across my personal AI workshop after Oscar finished a weekly reset of the system we’ve built together.

It checked the scheduled work, the dashboards, the knowledge tools, and the project loops. Most of it was healthy. A few new jobs still needed to prove themselves, while some old one-time jobs had become clutter. The recommendation for the reviewing agent was wonderfully unexciting: add nothing, let the working pieces produce evidence, and prune only when we know what has replaced them.

That was useful because building with agents can become its own hobby. Every new model, watcher, dashboard, and clever handoff feels like progress. Soon the workshop is full of machines tending other machines, and the person who owns it cannot tell which ones are helping.

The agent can inspect the estate, count failures, find stale parts, and carry the receipts. My job is to decide when enough is enough, which outcomes matter, and what should remain deliberately human.

So this week the plan is smaller. Use what we built. Watch what actually helps. Keep healthy systems quiet. Then remove the machinery that cannot show its value.

-dg

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