The underlying system of text files defining your identity, context, and skills is portable across different AI tools. As agentic tools converge in capability, this foundational 'OS' becomes your most valuable, enduring asset, making tool selection a less critical decision.
An unmaintained Agent OS has a shelf life of about eight weeks before context files are outdated and skills become irrelevant. To ensure compounding value, you must periodically conduct retrospectives with your agents, auditing which parts of the system are underutilized or stale and need updating.
Avoid creating a single, massive context document that quickly becomes stale. Instead, maintain 3-5 small, focused, and dated files on specific topics (e.g., team, product). Treat context as an ongoing practice of curation: whenever you re-explain something to the AI, it should be added to a context file.
Instead of writing your core identity file from scratch, prompt an AI to interview you with targeted questions about your work style, preferences, and rules. This brain-dumping method is faster, overcomes the blank-page problem, and produces a more comprehensive initial draft to refine over time.
The initial effort to build an agentic operating system (OS) is high because you're creating the foundation and the first agent simultaneously. However, this investment yields compounding returns. Subsequent agents are built much faster as they inherit the entire OS, only requiring a new job description and a few specific skills.
Before allowing an AI agent to write data or take actions (like sending emails), connect it with read-only permissions to your systems (e.g., calendar, inbox). Observe its behavior for several weeks to build trust and understand its failure modes. This phased approach minimizes the risk of unintended consequences.