Your first real workflows: briefing, triage, watchers.
A safe agent that does nothing useful is a smoke detector with no kitchen. These four starters were chosen on two criteria: they deliver real daily value, and every one stays inside the rails you built in Lessons 3–5. Notice what's not here — nothing that needs your passwords, your main inbox, or marketplace skills.
Real value, all read-and-report.
Tap each to see how you'd ask for it — in plain English — and the one safety rule baked in.
Read-and-report now, or earn write access first?
The thread through all four starters: the agent reads and reports, it doesn't act on your behalf. An agent earns write access the way a new hire does — weeks of clean, observable work first. Sort each task.
Ping me, or stay silent?
A good watcher messages you only when something changed — that's the line between an assistant and a notification problem. But it should still surface failures. For each daily check, what should the agent do?
All four starters let the agent do nothing irreversible — no sending mail to others, no spending, no posting, no files outside its workspace. That's deliberate. Write access to your life is earned one scope at a time, after the read-only phase proves boringly reliable. Lesson 8 covers exactly how to grant it.
Four daily workflows on a mid-tier model typically lands around $5–15/month, depending on how chatty your briefings are. Check the usage dashboard after week one — the briefing word limits and "stay silent" rules are the dials that move the bill.
Build two this week
The morning briefing plus one watcher is the perfect starter pair — one scheduled push, one quiet monitor. Run them a full week. When both have been boringly reliable for seven days, you've earned the next power-up: skills. Which is also where the danger comes back — so don't skip the vetting lesson.
What you can do now
- Set up a scheduled morning briefing with failure-reporting built in
- Run email triage on a dedicated, forward-fed inbox — read-and-report only, never clicking links
- Deploy watchers that alert on change and stay silent otherwise
- Fire off research errands as proper briefs from anywhere
- Explain why all starter workflows are read-only — and what an agent must do to earn write access
- Estimate and tune your monthly model spend