Here's the answer: an agent working unsupervised has exactly one source of judgment, what you wrote down. Delegation is a writing skill, and the work order has five mandatory parts. The deliverable, named as an artifact, a six-page report at this path, never look into it. The standard, acceptance criteria the agent can check itself against. The territory, which files and sources are in bounds and what must not be touched. The uncertainty protocol, because stop-and-report beats guess-and-proceed, in writing. And the report format, what was done, what was verified, what was skipped and why.
Then install the single gate that eliminates most operator horror stories: for any job above trivial, ask for exploration and a plan first, not action. Reviewing a plan costs two minutes. Reviewing a wrong execution costs the afternoon.
Build the check into the assignment so work grades itself before you see it: confirm every link loads and every claim cites a source you actually opened. Run the acceptance list and report each item pass or fail. You're not trusting the worker less. You're making trust cheap to extend.
Then the habit that compounds: corrections go into the assignment text, never just the chat, because chat corrections evaporate and brief corrections compound. Every accepted brief gets filed by job class. Ten filed assignments is a department. Thirty is an operating manual for a business that mostly runs.
And one honesty check: if you can't write the acceptance criteria, you don't understand the job yet, and delegating it outsources the confusion, not the work.
The full discipline is Volume 2 of our Advanced Operator series.
Management was always a writing job. AI just made the ink executable.