When a Task Outgrows Its Brief
Keeping exploratory work in conversation creates room for each useful question to expand the ambition of what is being built.
Developed from a conversation between Pete Winn and Andy David
Andy began Seneca as a way to improve the SEO of a website. The work involved pulling data from Search Console, reviewing it against the codebase, writing tickets and passing those tickets to another agent for implementation. Lara could then review the site the following day and week to see whether the changes were taking effect.
Building that workflow prompted Andy to ask why he should keep repeating the work. The SEO task became an always-on tool with a work log that he could inspect when needed. From there, he imagined its findings feeding into marketing content. Those connected additions turned Seneca into a broader chief marketing officer app with a suite of predefined functions for Lara to operate.
Andy drew a distinction between contained delegation and exploratory development. He was comfortable launching a clearly defined research or SEO review in Flight Deck and letting an agent return with the result. Seneca required an iterative chat because each exchange exposed another possibility. Andy said he would not have reached the broader CMO concept by simply dropping the original task into Flight Deck.