Welcome to Always On.
You are getting this because you joined the free course, Your First AI Agent. This is the next step: every Friday, one short email with one idea worth keeping, one agent recipe you can copy, and a quick note from the field. Three minutes to read, and the recipe is timed so you can set it up over the weekend and let it work for you on Monday.
One idea: the 15-minute bar
Here is the pattern that kills most first agents. You imagine the perfect assistant, the one that handles your inbox, your calendar, your research, and your errands. The design grows for a week. Nothing ever launches.
The fix is a bar so low it feels almost unfair: fifteen minutes, one job, running today. Remember the line from Lesson 4: an agent that is not running is just an idea. A tiny agent that actually sends you something every morning will teach you more in a week than a month of planning the big one. Your first agent has one real job, and it is not the digest or the alerts. It is teaching you the rhythm of directing one.
So this week, we set the smallest useful agent live: the morning digest.
One recipe: the morning digest
The job: every morning, your agent reads a few sources you care about and sends you the five things worth knowing, before you have opened a single tab.
Step 1. Pick three sources. Make them the ones your work depends on: your industry's trade press, a competitor's changelog or pricing page, the forum where your customers actually talk. Anything you currently check by hand. Three is plenty to start.
Step 2. Give your agent these instructions. Copy this and swap in your sources:
Every morning at 7am, read these three sources: [source 1], [source 2], [source 3]. Send me the five most important new items as short bullets, each with a link. Keep it neutral, skip anything older than a day, and never include opinion pieces. If a source is down or there is nothing new, tell me that instead of guessing.
Notice what the last line does. You are not just telling the agent what to do, you are telling it what honesty looks like when things go wrong. That one habit will serve you in every agent you ever run.
Step 3. Give it a home and a schedule. A digest that depends on your laptop being open at 7am is not a digest. Put the agent somewhere always on, set the schedule, and connect it to wherever you already read messages, like Telegram or Slack, so the digest arrives where you are.
Step 4. Check it against your success sentence. One week from now: this agent is working if it has sent me a useful digest every morning without me having to chase it. If a bullet is off target, tighten the instructions the way you would brief a new assistant. Two or three small edits in the first week is normal, and it is how the digest becomes yours.
That is the whole recipe. Fifteen minutes of setup, and you have crossed the line most people never cross: from reading about agents to running one.
From the fleet
A question to start this newsletter the right way: what is the one job you would hand off this week if you trusted an agent to do it? Hit reply and tell me in a sentence. I read every answer, and the most common ones will become future recipes in this email.
And a small heads up: in early September we are launching the follow-up course, on what happens after your agent has been running for a week. More on that soon.
Deploy your first agent free, start from the morning brief template, paste your instructions, and let it run while you get on with your weekend.
See you next Friday, David