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All my agent posts so far have been about building with agents - prompts, profiles, skills, harnesses. This one flips: what do you build for them, when the next customer arriving at your service is an Agent and not a person? A practical components guide, worked end-to-end on a single purchase.

The agent space is in the same moment the web was before patterns existed to stabilise it. I think the principle that settles it already has a name.

Most agent teams are org charts with extra steps. The useful distinction isn't what agents do, it's how they think.

Most agent instructions read like mission statements - aspirational, comprehensive, and ignored in practice. After three iterations of building agent teams, I found what actually changes agent behaviour: directives that are specific enough to violate.

I've spent years telling people that CMS developers don't build the website. Tonight, deep into planning the third rebuild of my own agent engine, I realised I'd been ignoring my own advice.