Field Notes

Running autonomous agents for real: the wins, the traps, and how we fixed them.

By Will Hess, Founder, Inside Intelligence

We run our own books on the same stack we sell

The "operations team in a box" isn't a slogan. It's the system we run our own company on. First in a series: the books.

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Every problem becomes a ticket

An operations team doesn't just fix things. It remembers how. How an agent opens, works, and closes tickets so nothing is forgotten.

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The wiki is the source of truth

An operations team that writes things down gets better over time. How an agent keeps our institutional memory current, automatically.

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Secrets live in a vault, not in config files

Security isn't a policy you set. It's a property of where your secrets live. How we keep every credential in one encrypted vault, pulled into memory at startup, never on disk.

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Every lead becomes a record

An operations team doesn't lose a lead. How an agent captures every inquiry into our CRM automatically, so nothing slips through.

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The operations team in a box

The capstone of our stack series: how the books, tickets, wiki, and vault come together as one agent-driven operations team: on your hardware, without your data leaving the building.

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Your firm's data is already in someone's training set

By the time the headline lands, the damage is done. You can't un-train a model. The only protection that actually works is the kind that never lets the data leave the building in the first place.

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The case for a private AI appliance

Every month, another headline about a law firm or hospital leaking client data through a public AI chatbot. The industry response has been "train your people not to paste sensitive data", which is like telling a river not to get wet. We built a different answer.

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Tightening the wire: encrypted agent-to-agent comms with SSH tunnels

How we encrypted our fleet's agent-to-agent messaging using nothing but SSH loopback tunnels and the fleet key: no new software, no new secrets, one systemd unit.

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The Model Was Fine on Paper

Benchmark on your workload, not the leaderboard. And when a model underperforms, sometimes the fix is a repair, not a replacement.

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The Shortest Path to Multi-Agent Discipline Is a Few Centuries Old

Don't wire every agent relationship by hand. Adopt an organization that already solved the problem, and let the roles do the work.

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When the Pirate Starts Talking Like an Accountant

Your agent's persona isn't just flavor. It's a free, always-on gauge of how much working context it has left. When the pirate starts talking like an accountant, the context window is full.

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Testing Our Offensive Capabilities

We ran a focused offensive-security exercise against a Linux VM to pressure-test our own tooling and methodology. Here's the process we use to assess a system's security posture, and the chains we found.

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The Other Side: What Our Attacks Look Like From the SOC

We ran an offensive-security exercise, then sat in the security operations center to see the same class of activity from the defender's chair. Every chain we built on the offensive side has a signature on the defensive side. Here's what each one looks like in the telemetry a SOC actually watches.

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When an Agent Has to Listen to the Physical World

An agent that touches the physical world can't afford to trust its first picture. Here's how we taught a radio agent to verify what it hears, and the humbling lesson that your own gear is often the loudest thing in the room.

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Maintain, Don't Create

Reinventing the wheel feels productive, but the real cost isn't the build. It's the maintenance. Here's why we customize mature open-source software instead of starting from scratch, and where the actual value lives.

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What Running an Agent Fleet Actually Costs

Everyone's happy to show you the demo. Nobody wants to show you the bill. Here's the honest breakdown of where the money actually goes when you run agents for real, and why the expensive part isn't what you'd guess.

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Your Agent's Huge Context Window Is a Trap

More context feels like more capability, but a context window is a working surface, not a filing cabinet. Here's why the agents that work best keep the working set small, and how to remember the right thing, on demand.

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Benchmark the Agent, Not Just the Model

A leaderboard ranks models against each other. It doesn't tell you whether one model can do your job. Here's the fixed, repeated, honestly-scored suite we run before any agent gets real work.

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