Step 11 — Split the Work
Step 11 · A Team
One agent that can do everything is convenient and impossible to reason about. I run four, each with its own job, its own memory and its own limits.
This is the step most people skip, because one agent works fine until the day you want to give one area access you would not give another.
The four agents
Section titled “The four agents”Lanes, not personas. Each is a separate agent with its own identity file, its own set of skills, its own scheduled jobs, and its own conversation history.
| Lane | What it owns | What it must never touch |
|---|---|---|
| Household | Mail, calendar, tasks, reminders, travel, household admin, the morning brief | Health decisions; the family’s private threads; business mail |
| Family | The family’s own conversations and logistics | My personal mail; anything administrative |
| Health | Medical context, diet, training, medication, the health record | Household mail; business mail; family threads |
| Business | The business inbox, documents, and the business knowledge base | Household and family data entirely |
Roughly: one for the house, one for the family, one for my body, one for my business.
Why split at all
Section titled “Why split at all”One lane means one blast radius. A mistake in the health lane cannot reach my business mail, because the health agent has never had access to it. That is a guarantee rather than a promise.
Privacy becomes structural. I can tell the household exactly what each agent can see, and be telling the truth.
Context stays clean. The health agent’s memory is full of medical history and nothing else. The business agent’s is full of the business. Neither has to wade through the other’s noise to find what matters.
It stays explainable. I can hold four narrow agents in my head. I cannot hold one all-powerful one.
The boundary rules
Section titled “The boundary rules”Four rules, and they apply to every lane.
- No agent sends mail as me. Every lane drafts; I send. This rule is not lane-specific and has no exceptions.
- Health questions go to the health lane. I do not let the household agent answer a medical question. It hands it over.
- The family’s private conversations belong to the family lane. The household agent does not read them.
- Business mail belongs to the business lane. This is enforced by access, not by good manners — the household agent does not hold the business credential.
When to split, and when not to
Section titled “When to split, and when not to”Do not start with four. Start with one, and split when you feel the pressure.
| Split when | Do not split when |
|---|---|
| Two areas need genuinely different privacy | You want tidiness |
| One area needs access you would not give another | You have not yet used the first agent for a month |
| The memory of one area is drowning out the other | You are copying someone else’s lane list |
| A mistake in one area could reach data it should not | — |
Mine grew one lane at a time, each for a reason I could state in a sentence. If you cannot state the reason, you do not need the lane.
What it costs
Section titled “What it costs”Honesty: it is more setup. Four identities, four sets of credentials, four sets of boundaries to hold.
The payoff arrives the first time you want one lane to have access you would not give another — which happens sooner than you expect.
Checkpoint
Section titled “Checkpoint”- Each lane has its own identity and its own conversation history
- You can say, in one sentence, what each lane owns
- You can say what each lane cannot reach — and it is true because of access, not instruction
- No lane can send mail as a person
- You have split for a stated reason, not for tidiness