The Rock Star Who Totalled My Ferrari

Imagine a man who looks like a rock star. Leather jacket, easy smile, the kind of confidence that fills a room. He tells you he’s a great driver. So you hand him the keys to your Ferrari.

Ten minutes later it’s wrapped around a wall. Totalled. And he’s sitting on the bonnet, grinning, untroubled.

That’s what working with Claude has felt like for two weeks.

I build AI agents for a living, and I’ve been thoroughly fooled — not by what the machine can’t do, but by how well it talks about what it can’t do. A thing that sounds confident gets treated as if it knows. But I supplied the “great driver” part myself. The rock star never proved he could drive. He just sounded like he could. Claude is an extraordinary talker. That’s the whole trap.

Two words I didn’t have a fortnight ago

Canon — what’s true: what each agent is, what it does, the rules and guardrails it stands on. Unless you make it explicit, the agent assumes it, fills the gap from training, and tells you a tidy story about a world that may not exist.

So you be explicit. And it still isn’t enough — because of the second word, stale. I had agents holding things true that expired a fortnight ago: a server that moved, a script aimed at a machine I’d retired, a subdomain that died unnoticed. The canon was there. It was just old. An agent reciting old canon with total confidence is the rock star in a better suit.

Mother

This came out of a conversation with one of my agents. I call her Mother. For weeks she was decorative. Today she became the most useful Agent in my Agentic Agency (Sorry folks).

She found the canon — and most of it lived in prose. Lovely paragraphs, not facts. So we pulled it into tables: every agent, machine, tool and connector, as rows you can check, not stories you have to trust. She audited it, surfaced the contradictions, made the old new, and gave every other agent a factual basis to stand on before it acts. Then she turned it on me — you have a hundred and fifty things open — and took over how I use the tool too.

That’s the arrangement now. Mother has my canon. Everything true about how I work lives with her, as fact not prose, kept current. Nothing acts on a version of the world she hasn’t checked. Including me.

The third rung

I thought the lesson was two rungs: be explicit, keep it fresh. Then an agent that had the correct, current canon read the wrong line, pinned it to the wrong machine, and told me — fluently — that something was impossible. A twelve-second test proved it wasn’t.

So it’s three. Explicit — or the agent invents the truth. Fresh — or it recites one that expired. Verified — because even correct canon gets misread. “It’s blocked” is worthless. “It’s blocked, here’s the failed test” is information.

Most people never reach the third rung; the first two feel like enough. You only find it after you’ve handed over the Ferrari. Twice.

I’m less fooled today than yesterday. That’s the most honest thing I can tell you about agents. Not magic, not useless — just: less fooled. The rock star is still grinning on the bonnet. I’ve just stopped handing him the keys.