AI Agents · Advanced · about 18 minutes

Building your first agent — bounded, read-only, supervised

You build an agent to research suppliers. You give it browsing and write access to your supplier sheet. It runs, follows a chain of links, spends forty minutes and a meaningful amount of money, writes eleven rows of partly-fabricated supplier data into your sheet, and you cannot tell which rows are real.

You need

Goal: research a potential supplier before we contact them. Needs to look at: their website, MCA data if available, their marketplace listings if any, trade directories.

Tool

An agent mode in a major assistant, with tools restricted

You get

1. GOAL, NARROWED — 'Produce a sourced one-page brief on [supplier name] covering: what they make, their scale indicators, how long they have operated, and any publicly visible customers or certifications.

Time saved

A bounded first agent costs a few hours to specify and makes the inevitable first surprises cheap rather than expensive.