A few weeks ago we launched the Every Agent, one Slack agent for the whole company.
Here are @bigwilliestyle’s 3 rules for designing an agent the company can use:
1. Conversations: Help the agent follow a Slack thread.
With a personal agent, the conversation is straightforward. You type, the model answers, and you’re done. In a Slack thread, anyone can jump in at any time.
To feel like a coworker, a shared agent has to follow the conversation, even when several people are talking at once. Because we knew this was a likely point of failure, @paridhitweets and the team added a translation layer that organizes Slack messages for the model and sends its replies back to the thread.
2. Connections: Keep tasks running when logins change.
For an agent to be useful, it has to reach the tools that people need. But each connection requires the agent to sign in to the tool through someone’s account. If that login breaks, it could stop everyone’s work.
@leeknowlton has set up a task to connect to a “slot,” where any login that meets the task’s requirement can reside. When a login expires, the connection in the slot gets swapped out.
Most people will never see any of this. Their automations will keep running as usual.
3. Permissions: Put access rules in code.
When a company agent can reach everything the team has connected, each request raises two questions: Whose access is the agent using, and is the person asking allowed to use it?
People treat Every Agent like a coworker, and human coworkers sometimes bend the rules. But an agent can’t make such judgments, and the rigidity can make it frustrating to work with.
The rules about who can do what live in code, underneath the model, rather than in the instructions the model reads. This way, the model can’t be convinced to bend rules that it shouldn’t.
Install the Every agent: https://every.to/agent?utm_source=x&utm_campaign=every-agent-launch&utm_content=every-shared-agent-three-design-rules-install
Read more: https://every.to/source-code/why-we-replaced-personal-agents-with-one-for-the-whole-company?utm_source=x&utm_campaign=every-agent-launch&utm_content=every-shared-agent-three-design-rules
