Eleanor Berger: Five Mistakes People Make with Agentic Factories
intellectronica · x · 2026-10-10
Eleanor Berger's essay on the five most common mistakes when building an "Agentic Factory" — a repeatable way to get work done through agents. The key shift is from directing every step to giving agents an outcome, context, and a way to check their work, letting them run asynchronously and return inspectable results.
Key points:
- Micromanaging: the agent is busy, you're busy, yet you're still deciding every next step — the first mistake is failing to hand over outcome-based tasks with self-checks.
- The other mistakes revolve around delegating work, choosing models, providing context, and controlling agent permissions (full list truncated in excerpt).
- She and Hugo Bowne-Anderson teach a course, Build Your Agentic Software Factory.
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