ÜBER DIESE EPISODE
Six months ago the instruction was simple: build AI agents. Automate the busywork. Move faster.
So you did. One agent to summarize meetings. One to triage the inbox. One to write the status report, and another to check the first one’s status report.
Now there are agents everywhere. They ping you, they ping each other, and somewhere in the pile is a task a human used to do in ten minutes.
This is agent sprawl, and almost nobody warned you about it.
How it happens
Nobody decides to build forty agents. You build one, it works, and the reward is a request for three more. Each one is reasonable on its own. Together they become a second job: watching, fixing, and explaining what the agents did.
The signs you’re there
* You spend more time reviewing agent output than doing the original work.
* Nobody can say who owns which agent, or what it’s allowed to touch.
* Two agents do the same thing, slightly differently, and both are “in production.”
* Something breaks and the first question is “which one did that?”
What helps
* Inventory everything. Name, owner, business function, project and cost for every agent. Yes, you can build an agent to do it.
* Sort by risk. Flag the agents that could do real damage and watch those first.
* Watch them in one place. Is it running, how often, what triggers it, and which agents depend on which.
* Evaluate and cut. Does it do its job? Does another agent do it better? Delete the duplicates.
* Take back control. Set an approval process, decommission what you can, and quarantine or retire anything rogue.
* Keep rationalizing. Every new agent gets checked against what already exists. It’s ongoing, not a one-time cleanup.
AI agents aren’t the problem. Building them without a plan for living with them is.
In this episode, a friend in tech stops me at a New York street festival with exactly this question, and Joe answers it step by step: how to rein in agents that are already running amok.
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