Rewire Work · How I think about agents
How I learned to build agents
Eight rungs. Seven failures. Every rung exists because the one below it stopped being enough, in a specific way I could name.
Nobody handed me this ladder. I climbed it one problem at a time, and each step up was forced by something breaking in the step below. That is the useful part. Not the list of things to build, but the failure that tells you it is time to build the next one.
You are here
Your next move:
Every rung carries the same worked example: one marketer, alone, building the content engine for a consumer brand. It is a real system, anonymized. The late rungs are documented, down to the pass that found the missing piece. The early rungs are reconstructed, because the engine did not exist yet. That is how the same job would have run before it did.
The pattern underneath
You do not climb because the next thing is more sophisticated. You climb because the thing you built stopped being enough, and you can say exactly how.
That is the test. If you cannot name what is breaking, you are not ready for the next rung. And if you can name it, you already know which rung it is.
Most people I talk to are somewhere between three and five, and they think they are behind. They are not. They are exactly where the failure they are living with puts them.