Human out of the loop

Your agent does in an hour what took you an afternoon. And then you sit next to it for the rest of the day: a permission prompt, a code by text message, a login screen that keeps coming back, a question asked at three in the morning that waits until morning for an answer. The human in the loop is often the slowest link.

Human out of the loop follows Marijke of Lindeboom Fietsen, a fictional bicycle business with a workshop, a webshop and four agents, through 25 ways to take the human out of the loop and still stay in charge. You give your agent its own email address, a browser profile that stays logged in and a way to make its own one-time codes. You connect programs through their API and operate the screen where there is no API with Playwright.

You set hard limits outside the prompt, measure whether your agent can escape, keep a log it cannot change and choose where a human check applies. The work keeps running when your computer is off, recovers after an outage, stays within its caps, and you steer it from your phone. Every chapter ends with a prompt for your agent and something you do the same day.

Everything is explained in plain words.