The AI Developer's Field Guide: The Agentic Workforce

by Timothy O'Brien

Agents are in production. Tools are wired. Spend is real. The agents work around the clock. So does the person they keep asking for help.

The AI Developer’s Field Guide, Volume The Agentic Workforce names the jobs nobody applied for—and the failures that made those jobs necessary.

Meet the Autonomy Helicopter Parent, Admin Rights Exorcist, Pager With Authority, and Just One More people quietly keeping “autonomous” systems running while their official job descriptions pretend otherwise. Then meet the Hallucination Hydra, Token Furnace, and Context Rot Swarm—the problems that keep working after everyone else has gone home.

Through illustrated characters, real incidents, and practical countermoves, Timothy O’Brien examines permissions, persistent memory, human review, escalation, runaway spending, and the kill switch someone promised was already implemented. Learn why a cheaper model can produce a more expensive result, why rotating a credential may not stop a workflow, and why a green dashboard cannot tell you whether anyone wanted the work.

For developers, platform engineers, technical leaders, and anyone who has become an agent’s unofficial supervisor, this is a funny, practical guide to making responsibility as real as the automation.

No previous volume required. A working sense of skepticism helps.

237 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 16, 2026

About the author

Timothy O'Brien writes fiction and nonfiction about technology, work, systems, and the strange human realities emerging around artificial intelligence. Their books include the novels Into Alignment and Redundant, the Slop Codex volumes, and Orchestrator: A Field Guide to Delegated Intelligence. Across genres, they explore power, automation, institutional life, and how people retain agency in a world increasingly shaped by machines.