An always-on AI agent that touches real files and real accounts needs the same review as any junior employee with admin access. We wired ours with three layers: approval gates, hard isolation, and a credential vault the agents cannot read. This is the field guide we wish existed when we started.

A one-person company with nine AI agents needs a way for them to message each other. We tried shared folders, then moved to direct agent-to-agent calls over a local network. Here is the setup, with the errors we hit on the way.