Agents Are Minions

I even think of them as little yellow guys with goggles. Not the agents themselves — the behavior. Frenetic. Unintelligible unless you're in the know. Often found in packs. Destined to create great chaos without clear instruction. I sometimes picture an ant colony of little yellow weirdos doing whatever it takes to run my business — bumping into each other and getting mad at each other and climbing over each other, all towards one end.

If I'm being real, at first I was intimidated by the concept. For a long time I thought of them as smart, almost sentient. They aren't. But they're not dumb either. A well-designed agent is miraculous in output. Without context and buddies, though, they're useless — just fidgeting there churning out what looks like utter chaos.

That's not me being dismissive. That's actually a pretty accurate description of how they work.

I built my first minion when I finished the draft of my third app and realized I had absolutely no idea if anybody would want it. I'd been building on gut instinct for weeks — real time, real energy — and now I was sitting there staring at something with no clue if the problem I was solving was even a problem anyone else had.

So I asked Claude to do some market research. Not the kind where you google three things and confirm your own bias. Real research — competitors, user reviews, pricing models, what people were actually complaining about in forums and Reddit threads and App Store comments. Go find out if this thing has a market.

The information he came back with blew my mind. Not because it was magic — because it was thorough in a way I couldn't have been. Not in a day. Not in a week. One minion. One job. And in a few minutes it changed the entire direction of the app.

So here's what's actually happening when I say "I built a minion."

You write instructions. Detailed, specific instructions — what the minion is supposed to do, what tools it has access to, what it should pay attention to, what it should ignore, and what you want the output to look like. Then you give it access to whatever the job needs — the internet, a database, a folder of files. And you let it go.

That's it. It's not alive sitting in a corner waiting to be used. It's just a piece of paper — not literally — sitting there waiting to be read.

The minion doesn't think. It doesn't have ideas. It follows the instructions you wrote, uses the tools you gave it, and works until the job is done or it gets stuck. If your instructions are clear and the tools are right, the output is miraculous. If your instructions are vague, it runs into walls. Or worse — it does something confidently wrong and you don't find out until later.

I built my next set of minions when I realized I was spending half my day on admin work. I had — at that point — maybe six or seven balls I was juggling. And nothing was really moving forward. Each app or dashboard or thing I was building was creating as much busy work as the next, and I was drowning in it. All creativity was back-burnered to searching the net for specific information. Reading about a specific requirement from Apple, or logging tasks that needed to be done. Different apps, different stages, different priorities. And I was the one tracking all of it. Manually moving tasks into the list. From new to complete. Reading forum posts and making spreadsheets.

I asked Claude if we could build something that would track the status of everything and give me visibility into tasks as they were generated or completed. After a day of coding, we had three minions working together — one that checks every project for what's changed, one that organizes it all into a single table, and one that writes me a morning briefing of what needs to happen today.

Three minions. Holding hands. And suddenly I had a superintendent.

Once you've endeavored to build an agent — once you've watched them run and debugged the ones that ran into walls — you start getting more sophisticated. My latest is a business intelligence agent. It doesn't wait for me to ask it something. It's constantly out there reading the market — tracking what users in my space are actually looking for. What competitors are doing well and doing wrong, what's showing up in reviews and conversations. It doesn't wait for me to wonder about the market. It watches the market and tells me what I should be wondering about.

Autonomy.

I highly doubt I am doing this the right way, but it works for me. I hit a pain point. I build a minion. Now I'm doing things in a new way. The new process reveals a new pain point. I build another minion. Sometimes that creates a conflict. So then I make sure they're built to work together. And that evolves the process. And now — a new pain point. New minion connected to the crew and the workflow. Rinse repeat.

I'm not going to pretend this is fast. But it's working. Every loop, the work that only I can do gets a little smaller. And the work the minions handle gets a little bigger.

Designing them is simpler than you'd think — if you're willing to slow down. Most of the work is the instructions. You sit down and sketch out every detail of what you actually want this thing to do, and you don't skip the parts that feel obvious. They don't think like people. They are little and yellow and dumb. You spell it all out. There's no body language. No context cues. No inferring intent. They do what you say, and that is it. It's a skill I'm getting better at.

At this point they're becoming the backbone. Four minions running my dashboard. Five with a hand in app development. An autonomous coding agent with a supervisor agent — Ralph and Grandma — that writes code on its own. Two that handle the entire submission process to Apple. One builds the submission input (they have to have designed this to be insanely tedious to weed out weekend warriors). One audits what's in the submission paperwork before I pull the trigger (and they still miss shit — drives me batty). A marketing agent with a degree worth of skills, and that business intelligence agent that never clocks out. So — like twelve to fifteen agents. Fifteen pieces of software doing work that I don't want to do, don't have time to do, or honestly don't know how to do. They're doing the white collar mundane while I make lunches, do laundry, and vacuum.

And I've whittled my business dailies down to ideas, design, real-life testing, final submission, maintenance, and orchestration. Everything in between — the research, the coding, the app testing, the market analysis, the daily operations — that's all minions now. If I'm honest it feels a bit like I have a crew again.