I recently read Rich Holmes’s post Personal Agent Systems Explained - How 5 Leaders Run their work through AI Agents (well, the part before the paywall) and found it really interesting. I decided to ask Claude to make a diagram of my own system as well, and then I wrote some content around it, and now I’m sharing it with you in case it’s helpful (or you want to yell at me about how I’m doing it wrong).
How I Work is a mini site that goes through the whole thing, but here’s the overview diagram:
The main elements:
- Me: nothing is fully autonomous. I don’t think that should ever change.
- Context: what the agent knows about me and my work, loaded only when a task needs it.
- Workflows: saved commands for repeated work.
- Live data: agents check the real systems instead of guessing.
- Review: a second model checks anything before it even gets to me for editing.
- Lessons: corrections go back into the context, so agents don’t make the same mistake twice.
I’m sure lots of people have more sophisticated workflows and one of my reasons for posting this is that I want to hear about them!
The one thing that I don’t see a lot of out there, and that I want to point to specifically here, is how important it is for the system to be able to learn. The most important command I have is /session-end (generic version available here), which writes a handoff note and updates context and skill files. That way the system keeps learning and the agent never (well, rarely…) makes the same mistake twice.