The reflex to check everything
My first instinct was familiar: inspect every sentence, every intermediate result, every tiny decision. Then I asked myself whether I supervise a human colleague in the same way. If somebody has shown that they handle a bounded task reliably, I normally give them room. The same principle can guide our relationship with agents.
Preparing a dossier is a useful example because it combines several different kinds of work. Gathering information, organising an argument, producing a document and preparing correspondence each have different failure modes. A polished PDF can still contain an unsupported statement. A completed draft is one stage; approval, sending and formal submission are separate stages. The workflow must keep those distinctions visible.
Trust the task, not the personality
An agent that writes clearly has not thereby proved that it can interpret eligibility rules or commit a company to obligations. Trust needs a scope. I want to know what the agent was asked to do, which sources it used, which checks ran and which questions remain open. That evidence is more useful than an agent declaring that everything is finished.
For a repeatable task, start with representative examples and an explicit definition of success. Compare the agent's output with accepted work. Record material mistakes, missing information and the time humans spend correcting it. Include awkward cases, not just the easy demonstration. A system that reliably recognises its own limits is far more useful than one that always produces a confident answer.
Put human attention where it changes the outcome
I separate preparation from consequential action. Agents can research, organise and draft within agreed access. People retain decisions such as accepting obligations, approving sensitive disclosures or authorising expenditure. The boundary should be designed into the process so that everybody understands what can move forward and what must wait.
Review can then become proportional. New or uncertain work gets closer attention. Repeated, well-understood work can use automated checks and sampled review. Changes to the task, source material or tools may justify more supervision again. This is an operating habit: give room when evidence improves, narrow the scope when something changes.
Measure the supervision you are removing
The goal is useful capacity. If a person spends an hour checking an hour of automated work, the process still needs redesign. Track completed work, correction effort, exceptions and the time between request and usable result. A faster draft is valuable when it leads to a faster, sound decision.
My question on LinkedIn was conditional: if an agent consistently makes fewer mistakes on a task, why supervise it more? The answer comes from the actual task and evidence. Give your digital colleagues clear work, clear boundaries and a route to ask for help. Then let them earn more responsibility. Otherwise you have hired an assistant and accidentally promoted yourself to full-time babysitter.