01 — What A Routine Is
One Job, On A Clock, Then Stops
It wakes up at a set time, does the single thing it was hired to do, writes down what it found, and goes back to sleep until tomorrow. A clock and a job. That simple shape is the whole point. A routine that does one job on a clock is something you can trust, check, and reason about. An agent that does five jobs and never sleeps is something you spend your life debugging.
92%
AI does the work: design, build, run, check itself, report
The 92% the AI does
Figures out how to do the job, builds itself, runs every day, checks its own work, and tells you how it went.
The 8% you do
The handful of decisions a machine should never make for you. What is worth automating. What good looks like. When it has earned the right to run on its own. Whether today's output is right. Small in time, large in leverage. You stop doing the work and start deciding about the work.
02 — The Two Homes
Where Your Routine Lives
A routine runs in one of two places. Picking the wrong one is the most common early mistake.
Local Scheduled Task
Where it runsOn your computer, while your AI app is open
Fires when the app is closed?No. A missed slot runs the next time you open the app
Best forPersonal, context-rich routines where a late run is fine, like a morning brief or a weekly debrief
Cloud Agent
Where it runsIn the cloud, always on
Fires when the app is closed?Yes. Runs on time no matter where you are
Best forAnything that has to fire reliably, like revenue checks, client-facing work, and time-sensitive sends
"Does it matter if this silently doesn't run today?"
No → a local scheduled task is fine.
Yes → put it in the cloud.
03 — The Five Moments
Your 8%, Gate By Gate
A routine moves through six gates from idea to trusted. The AI carries almost all of it. You step in at five points, and only five.
Gate
What the AI does (the 92%)
What you do (the 8%)
Pre-flight
Answers the scoping questions and names the blind spots before anything gets built
Confirm or correct the scope
Design
Proposes a one-page build spec against the scoping rules
Name the gap. Approve the one duty.
Build
Writes the entire routine
Nothing
Deploy
Schedules it on the clock
Green-light it to go live
On-ramp (7 days)
Runs every day, logs its own performance, writes a graduation report
One word on Day 7: Graduate, Run another week, or Fix it
Graduation
Flips to active and takes ownership of the duty
Spot-check the output, not the work
You touch the routine five times. Every touch is a decision only a human can make.
04 — The Five Non-Negotiables
What Makes A Routine You Can Trust
These separate a routine you can trust from one that bites you later. Hold every routine to all five.
1
One Duty
Version one does exactly one job. New ideas park in a "v2 and beyond" list. An agent doing three jobs is three agents wearing one coat, and it fails three ways at once.
2
Bounded Sources
Name every database, tool, and document it is allowed to read. A finite list. Unbounded reading is unbounded risk.
3
Memory Loop
Every run reads the corrections and lessons from past runs, and writes back one observation. A routine that does not remember repeats the same mistake forever.
4
Fail Loud, Never Silent
A blocked run writes a visible report that says what failed, where, and when, somewhere you will see it the next morning. The nightmare case is an agent that died on an expired login and nobody noticed for weeks.
5
You Own The Send Button Until Graduation
Anything that reaches the outside world, like an email that sends or a post that publishes, stays in your hands in version one. The routine drafts it. You ship it.
05 — Where To Start
Begin With A Routine That Only Reports
Start with a routine that surfaces things and never acts. A morning brief that reads your numbers and hands you a 90-second summary. A watchdog that checks whether yesterday's routines actually ran and flags the ones that went quiet. Neither one touches a send button. Neither one can do harm.
Read-only routines that report loudly build trust faster than anything else, because you feel the 92/8 split with zero risk on the line. You watch the AI do the daily work and you do nothing but read the result. Once that feels normal, graduating to a routine that drafts and then sends becomes an easy next step.
Read-only that reports
→
Drafts that you send
→
Sends on its own (after graduation)
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