4 posts
My boss graded my Critic design a B, reasoning: 'this is for Apple-scale companies, we're not Apple.' That sentence is the single most expensive misconception in AI Agent adoption. Five minutes to see through the six hollow spots in a 'deploy and abandon' proposal; ten minutes to walk into a vendor review armed with four questions they can't answer.
A Critic second-pass review is the only thing standing between an L2 customer-service Agent and a refund mistake. But the '95% automation rate' vendors keep showing you is almost always fail-open — Critic times out, the action passes through. Five minutes to see through three flavors of fake backstop; ten minutes to redraw your team's design.
A customer-service Agent looks like the perfect candidate for L3 multi-Agent orchestration. The ones that actually ship are all L2 deterministic workflows. A refund the autonomous chain pushed through by mistake, and the five forks it forces you to think about.
The word 'Agent' has been so abused that salespeople, executives, engineers, and the media all mean four different things by it. This is a 4-level ruler (L0-L3): one criterion, five self-check questions, three worked examples, and 28 retail scenarios graded for real. Five minutes to see through fake-Agent marketing; twenty minutes to grade your entire project portfolio.