The Collaboration Contract Guides

Guides: Delegating to AI Agents

Field guides for $5–50M founders rebuilding collaboration around one owner, end-to-end, with a team of agents. Every guide answers a question founders actually ask — no hype, no invented numbers, and the judgment stays human.

What Is Delegation to AI Agents?

The definition: handing defined work to an AI that executes against a written definition of done — and the two things (discernment and diligence) that never leave the owner.

What Tasks Should a Founder Delegate to AI Agents First?

The three tests — describable, verifiable, reversible — the four categories that pass them everywhere, and how to sequence the first month.

How to Write a Delegation Brief an AI Agent Can Execute

The six-part brief — outcome, context, constraints, definition of done, checkpoints, example — with a worked sample and the tight-versus-vague failure modes.

How Do You Verify AI Agent Work Without Redoing It?

Judge against the contract, demand receipts, spot-check where wrongness is expensive — and why "send it back" beats "fix it yourself" every time.

AI Agents vs Offshore VAs vs Employees: Where Should the Work Go?

Route work by shape, not headcount habit. A straight comparison across cost shape, ramp, throughput, and judgment — with the honest caveats included.

What Does Founder-Bottleneck Delegation Debt Actually Cost?

The backlog of work only you can move: where the cost hides, the illustrative math, and why adding agents to an approval-gated org makes it worse.

7 Delegation Mistakes Founders Make With AI Agents

The failure patterns behind most "agents didn't work for us" stories — from briefless handoffs to bolting agents onto the old approval chain.

Can You Delegate Judgment Calls to an AI Agent?

No — and you don't need to. The reversibility and blast-radius tests, what agents do around a decision, and why the line doesn't move with the models.

Which of your projects could one human own end-to-end?

The Collaboration Contract is a free eight-question diagnostic — about four minutes per project. It maps every project onto four quadrants and names the specific rework each stuck one needs.

Start the diagnostic →