The Maker's Block Has a New Shape
Your agents are the makers now. Like human makers, they need complete context, clear scope, and the runway to finish a task before something interrupts the chain. An agent handed a vague goal, a thin tool surface, or a token dump instead of curated context will stall or drift — and then it pings you. The interruption tax Graham described hasn't disappeared; it has moved from your calendar into your architecture. Every poorly scoped workflow is a meeting dropped into the middle of the afternoon.
Founders Still Live on the Maker's Schedule
The judgment calls that only you can make — setting goals, drawing boundaries, deciding what good looks like — require the same deep focus Graham was defending. If your agents are unreliable, you slip into manager mode by default, triaging outputs instead of thinking. The way to protect your maker blocks is to build evaluation harnesses before you build the agents themselves, so failures surface cleanly and rarely, rather than as a steady drip of context-switching across the day.
Schedule Design Is System Design
Graham's real insight was that schedule design is output design — how you arrange time determines what gets made. That logic extends directly to agentic systems. A workflow with tight tool definitions, structured results, and measurable success criteria runs without you. An agent built on vague autonomy becomes a recurring interrupt. Decide, as Graham advised makers to do, where your protected blocks live, and then engineer your agent layer to defend them rather than consume them.
