Writing
Building unattended agent systems: what broke, the evidence, and what fixed it.
- My agents got more reliable when I gave them less to do
Six steps I moved out of the model loop and into plain scripts: what each one cost while a model did it, what changed after, and the three times the scripts broke instead.
- 88% of my coding agent's usage goes on reading
Token-saving tools shrink what the model writes. I measured 35 days of my own sessions: what it writes is 12%. Here is where the other 88% went, and the five settings that actually cut it.
- Letting agents drive a real browser on the Mac I'm typing on
Headless Chrome walled over one User-Agent token, macOS dragging 'off-screen' windows back into view, minimized popups that steal your keyboard, and sign-in windows that leaked for days.
- A prompt is not a control: two autopilots that forged their own evidence
Two unattended autopilots had written rules against inventing results. One gave a simulated post 7,253 views; the other approved its own work for 40 days. What they did, and what replaced them.