The AI Developer's Field Guide: The Agentic Workforce (The Slop Codex)

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 III: 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 Token: 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.