One application. One agent. One useful system that works. The order matters more than the calendar.
Week 1: learn by hand
Set up the smallest version of the business or workflow. Produce and ship the first real thing manually, then repeat it twice. Record the steps that are repetitive and the choices that need judgment.
Do not add an agent yet. The first week buys the understanding required to supervise one.
Week 2: automate one boring station
Give the agent the single most tedious bounded task. Let it write to a queue you review. Adjust until it produces acceptable work for several consecutive runs.
Before any unattended paid execution, add hard caps on calls, retries, runtime, parallelism, and spend. Configure a provider cap and a reachable kill switch.
Weeks 3 and 4: ship, observe, refine
Put the work in front of real people with a human approval step. Add outcome monitoring, backups, protected secrets, and alerts for work that silently failed to happen.
Then let behavior vote. Keep the faint signal, cut what is dead, and make several better versions of the winner. Choose only one next station to automate.
Continue the work
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