Fragmented Context Is Fragmented Output
An agent interrupted by poorly scoped tools, ambiguous handoffs, or a token budget crammed with irrelevant retrieval is a maker who just got a 10 a.m. meeting scheduled. The work never reaches depth. Good context engineering means giving the model exactly what it needs for one sustained task — no more — so it can complete a coherent unit of work rather than context-switching inside a single prompt. Curation under the token budget is schedule design by another name.
Workflows Protect the Maker's Block
Most founders reach for agents when a workflow would serve them better, and the cost is invisible until production. A fixed path is a protected block of time with a known shape; an agent choosing its own path introduces the kind of open-ended interruption that kills deep work. Graduate from workflow to agent only where real branching exists. Premature agency is a manager's schedule imposed on a process that needed a maker's.
Judgment Is the Meeting That Must Happen
Graham acknowledged that managers are not villains — coordination is real work. The equivalent here is human judgment: setting goals, handling trust, owning accountability when the agent produces something unexpected. These interventions should be deliberate and bounded, not scattered across the pipeline. Build evals before you build the agent so that when human review is genuinely needed, it arrives as a scheduled checkpoint rather than a crisis interrupt that breaks the whole flow.
