Chapter 3: The Job Comes Before the Candidate
The last chapter delivered the candidate to the door: a degree, but no job. This chapter is about hiring and onboarding, and its core is an order of operations that almost everyone gets backwards — define the role first, then pick the candidate.
Here the system prompt is not an incantation to be chanted over and over. It is an employment contract: responsibilities, permissions, boundaries, reporting lines, all spelled out. Autonomy does not come from letting go; it comes from clear boundaries. When an agent underperforms, the real cause is rarely a weak model — it is a role that was never clearly defined. That judgment recurs throughout this book.
Treating the agent as a worker also means the employer doesn't get to stop at "what can it do for me." The prior questions: is the role I'm giving it clear, are the tools sufficient, are the permission boundaries explicit, is there feedback when things go wrong. Many agents are not refusing to work — they have been thrown into a job that no one bothered to write down.