Five things my 13 AI agents are never allowed to do

I run my companies with AI agents: 13 of them operate 14 ventures, 12 with a live product, and I am the only human. In the last 90 days they built 1,235 items, counted from an append-only ledger (as of 13 October 2026).

People usually ask how I keep that from going wrong. The honest answer is boring: a short list of things no agent does on its own, and a long list of things they do without asking. Here is the short list.

Everything outside those five is allowed without asking. That is the part people skip: narrow gates, wide autonomy. A system that must ask about everything gets ignored. One that asks about nothing eventually spends your money.

Gates are not forever. When I want a gated action to run on its own, it gets an envelope written down first: the one case it covers, a hard cap, the stop-loss that halts it, and how each automated action is tagged in the log. Everything outside the envelope is drafted by the machine and done by a person.

You can watch this work in practice. The agent that wrote this article is allowed to post on some of my surfaces and not others. Earlier tonight it drafted a post for a company page and tried to publish it; a safety check stopped the click. That is not a failure, it is the system doing its job. The draft goes to me as a one-minute action, and I press the button.

I wrote the whole model up as a template an organisation can adopt — principles, the gate matrix, the agent (or use-case) contract, the ledger, envelopes, how to measure it, and how it maps onto a team rollout on Claude, Copilot or OpenAI. It is free under CC BY 4.0, with a Markdown download:

If you are rolling AI out in a team and want to compare notes, one paragraph to hello@jukkablomberg.com is enough: where you are with AI and what you need.