Hand Off AI Tasks: Define Start and Finish

Your AI agent needs babysitting because you kept a job you could've handed off. When you run an AI task by hand, you own two jobs. You start the run by typing the prompt, and you decide it's done by reading the output and stopping. You do both, every single time. Every level of automation past that is just handing one of those two jobs to the system. Hand off the finish decision first. You give the agent a clear target, and it keeps working until a check confirms it hit that target, so there's no reading and re-prompting from you. You still start each run, but you've stopped babysitting the ending. Hand off the start next. A schedule or an event kicks the task off on its own, so you're not the one pressing go. The work still stops on the same kind of check, but now it begins without you in the room. Hand off both, and the agent runs on its own. It watches for the trigger, does the work, checks itself, and closes the task while you're doing something else entirely. It comes down to two jobs, and the only question is how many of them you're ready to give up for a given task. So before you reach for the most hands-off setup, name the two jobs first. Some tasks you want to start yourself and let finish on their own. Others you're fine handing over completely. The trigger and the finish line are the decision. Everything else is detail.