Two standing agents. Two scheduled runs a week. Nothing publishes without me.
Last revised August 2026
I run two scheduled AI agents that do defined jobs on a defined cadence and hand me drafts. They do not act on my behalf. They do not send mail, publish posts, or contact anyone. They read, filter, draft, and stop.
The interesting part of this system is not what it does. It is what I took out of it, twice. Sixteen agents became four in July. In August I decided four was still two too many.
An agent earns its slot by removing a decision I would otherwise have to make, or a search I would otherwise have to run. If it only produces output I never act on, it is not automation. It is noise with a schedule attached.
One looks forward. One looks back. That turned out to be the whole job.
Names and numbers for the week ahead. Who to contact, what to say to them, and what is at risk if I do not. It reads my task file, both calendars, and my mail, and it is required to end with three specific calls to make that day.
Output: one email that ends in three phone calls. If it cannot name three, it says so rather than padding the list.
An honest close on the week. What actually moved, what stalled, and whether it stalled on me or on someone else, because those are different problems. Then a kill list. The kill list is the point: it is instructed to recommend closing things I like, and to tell me when something marked open is already finished.
Output: a short written close, plus direct edits to the task file so the next week starts from something true.
The distinction that keeps this small is between a scheduled agent and a capability. A scheduled agent is for work that has to happen on a cadence whether or not I remember it. A capability is something I invoke when I need it, and it costs nothing the rest of the time.
Client research before a walkthrough, proposal drafting, settlement reporting, contract review, CRM cleanup, literature work on the dissertation. All of these are real and all of them run on AI. None of them are on a schedule, because none of them need to fire while I am asleep. Confusing capability with cadence is how four good ideas become thirty-seven runs a week.
Before anything goes on a schedule: would this be worse if I only ran it when I thought of it? If the honest answer is no, it is a capability, not an agent.
I built sixteen of these. At peak they ran roughly thirty-seven times a week. Some of it was genuinely useful. A lot of it was me automating my own anxiety.
Scheduled runs per week at peak, across 13 recurring agents
Scheduled runs per week now, across 2 agents
Reduction in scheduled compute, with no loss of anything I was acting on
The first audit was simple. For each agent I asked one question: in the last month, what did I actually do differently because this ran? Where the honest answer was nothing, it went. That took sixteen down to four.
Four agents felt defensible for about three weeks. Then I noticed something I had not thought to measure: nine of their runs were sitting in my sidebar unopened. Six from one agent, three from another.
That is a cleaner signal than the question I had been asking myself, because it does not rely on my memory or my self-image. An agent whose output you never open is not underperforming. It is unwanted, and it is quietly producing debt in the form of things you feel vaguely guilty about not having read.
Do not ask whether an agent is useful. Ask how many of its last ten runs you opened. What you are not reading, you are not acting on, and what you are not acting on is still costing you money and attention to produce.
All four went. Two came back as one forward-looking desk and one backward-looking desk.
Two other things surfaced in that cleanup, and both are the kind of problem you only find by running this yourself for a year rather than reading about it.
Anyone can stand up sixteen agents. The discipline that matters, and the one most organizations skip, is measuring what came back and being willing to turn off the things that did not earn their place, including the ones you were proud of building. I have now done that twice, and the second cut went deeper than the first. Adoption is not the hard part. Restraint is.
Paul Tonden · paul@houseofpraxis.studio · linkedin.com/in/paultonden