Archetypes

Every agent starts from one of six shapes. Each one fixes the question it asks, the tools it may use, the ceiling it runs inside, and how often it runs. You fill in the subject.

Six is deliberate. A catalogue of thirty shapes has the same problem as a menu of three hundred tools: nobody can find the right one, so nobody picks any.

The catalogue

Shape	What it does	Per run	Per month	Default cadence
Competitor watch	Checks the pages you name and reports what changed since last time	$5.00	$22.50	Weekly, Monday morning
Lead finder	Finds companies matching a profile, with a reason and a citation for each	$8.00	$36.00	Weekly, Monday morning
Topic researcher	Researches a topic and writes up what is worth saying, with sources	$6.00	$60.00	On demand
Data question answerer	Answers a question from your own data and shows the figures behind it	$3.00	$30.00	On demand
Deadline and compliance watcher	Watches for things expiring or changing and tells you before they bite	$3.00	$3.00	Monthly
Digest	Summarises what arrived and what needs a decision	$2.00	$62.00	Daily, early morning

The monthly figure is the per-run ceiling multiplied by how often the schedule fires. An on-demand agent is given an allowance of ten runs a month rather than an unlimited one. Change the cadence and the monthly ceiling moves with it.

Competitor watch

Reads pages you name, compares against what it saw last time, and reports what moved, quoting the specific figures or wording that changed.

May use: web search, reading a web page, its own earlier notes, writing a note. Never: publishes anything, sends anything, reads your own data.

Best subject lines name pages, not companies. "The pricing pages of example.com and example.org" beats "our competitors" by a wide margin.

Lead finder

Finds companies matching a profile and produces a shortlist. Each entry carries one reason it fits and one source that supports it.

May use: web search, reading a web page, writing a note. Never: sends an email, writes to your CRM, or contacts anyone. The shortlist is a note. What happens next is yours.

Topic researcher

Researches a subject and writes up what is worth saying about it, with a source for every claim.

May use: web search, reading a web page, its own earlier notes, writing a note. Never: publishes anything. It produces a note for you to read.

On demand by default, because research is usually something you want now rather than every Monday.

Data question answerer

Answers a question from your organisation's own data and shows the numbers the answer rests on.

May use: querying your data, asking your data in plain language, its own earlier notes, writing a note. Never: reaches anything outside your organisation. It has no web access at all, and that is not a setting.

This is the one shape that reads your own data, so read What agents can see before creating one.

Deadline and compliance watcher

Reports anything expiring, renewing or changing that affects what you named, with dates and sources.

May use: web search, reading a web page, its own earlier notes. Never: writes anything at all. It is entirely read-only, and reports back rather than filing.

Monthly by default, which is why its monthly ceiling and its per-run ceiling are the same number.

Digest

Summarises what has arrived since the previous run and says what needs a decision.

May use: its own earlier notes and your knowledge base, writing a note. Never: reaches outside your organisation, and decides nothing itself. It tells you what needs deciding.

Why you cannot design your own shape

Not yet, and the reason is worth stating. A shape generated on the fly is a program written by a model that then runs unattended on a schedule. Its failure mode is not a crash; it is a plausible-looking routine that quietly does the wrong thing every Monday for a month.

The six shapes are fixed, reviewed, and tested against known-good and known-bad examples. When custom shapes arrive they will be created switched off and end in an explicit approval, for the same reason.

Next

• Limits and costs: what the ceilings actually bound
• Your first agent: the whole path end to end