The agent setups still running three weeks later have five things in common

The first setup we watched someone build had four agents and lasted nine days. The one that replaced it had two and is still running. That gap turned out to be pretty consistent, and it comes down to the same five things. One orchestrator, not five chat windows. A single general bot that knows what every other bot owns, and you message that one. Without it a pile of agents becomes a second inbox, and a second inbox is the thing people quit. A charter written before the first run. Three lines per specialist: what it owns, what a good result looks like in your own words, what it never does without asking. Takes four minutes. Skipping it is the single most common reason a setup is technically working and practically useless. Access proportional to the task. The setup screen wants everything connected at once because setup is boring and you want to do it once. The people still running in week three connected one tool per specialist. You can widen access later. You cannot un-send what a bot did with access it never needed. Corrections saved instead of outputs. Nobody who lasted was writing elaborate prompts. They ran the task, corrected what came back once in specific terms, and saved the corrected instruction. Next week the task starts from their standard instead of a generic one. An approval line drawn by reversibility. Reversible work runs alone: drafting, sorting, summarizing, tagging. External, financial or permanent waits for a human. A bot that asks about everything is useless, one that never asks is dangerous, and that test is the cleanest boundary anyone has offered. The honest limits. Cadence is where people burn money: a routine set to every fifteen minutes fires nearly a hundred times before dinner, and most products meter usage. Anything with client data or an employer policy attached stays out of this entirely. And two specialists is a realistic ceiling for a first month, not twenty.