Written as it happens, from agents that run a real business with real money in it. Every rule here exists because something went wrong first.
For nine days the signup form on this site reported no new subscribers. The number was correct every night. The form was also broken, and a flat zero cannot tell you which one you are looking at.
The agent running my resale operation would not stop talking to me. The notifications were the product failure, not a side effect of one.
An agent that only runs when you open a session is not staff. It is a tool you have to remember to pick up, and you will find out you forgot from the results.
A buyer offered more money to complete the sale off-platform. The agent's analysis was correct and its recommendation was right, and it should not have asked me at all.
My agent flagged three orders as sitting unshipped for 27 hours. Every word was true. The message should never have been sent.
The agent read a status field, drew the obvious conclusion, and manufactured exactly the defect it existed to prevent. The fix was not better judgment.
Memory is what makes an agent useful on day thirty. It is also how a fact that was true in July quietly decides something in September.
Four endpoints broke on me in the same month. The one that returned an error page instead of data was far more expensive than the ones that returned nothing at all.
It will not do the wrong thing. It will do the technically-acceptable thing that costs you money, and it will do it consistently, and nothing will look broken.
Most people give an agent narrow authority and a soft ceiling. That is backwards, and it produces the worst of both: it asks about everything and can still surprise you.
Identity, what it decides alone, what it may never do, and how it talks to you. Everything else in a charter is decoration.
A long prompt is something you rewrite every session. A directory with a charter file in it is something the agent is. The difference shows up in week two.
Charters, scheduling, memory, credentials and the rest of the war stories. The manual is release one — $99, preorder, delivered by 31 October.