Rebar · The AI Office
The AI Office
Hiring your first AI employee.
A field guide for small business owners and small-team leaders. No coding, no jargon.
Before anything else
I want to tell you about a candidate.
Extremely well-read
Very fast
Works nights, weekends, holidays
Without complaint. Costs less per month than your phone bill.
The catch: on day one it knows nothing about your business. Not your customers, not how you like things written, not what "done" looks like to you. Today is how you fix that — and it's the same process you'd use for any new hire.
Think of one thing you did last week you wish you hadn't had to do yourself.
Not the hard, interesting part of your job — the other thing. Hold onto it. We're going to hire someone for it.
The one leap that matters
A smart temp with amnesia, or a colleague who already knows.
Chat
A brilliant stranger, every time.
Every time you open it you're talking to someone who's never heard of your company. So you explain. Again. Then you close the window and it's all gone.
Agent
A colleague who already knows.
You write it down once — who you are, how the job works, what good looks like — and it's there every time. Not a better answer. A colleague.
Five acts. Each one is a hiring decision.
02The Base Prompt
Orientation day.
03Projects & Skills
The training manual.
04Connectors
Giving them equipment.
05Access
The calls only you can make.
In practice
Meet Dana. She runs an 11-person commercial cleaning company. She writes the proposals, chases the invoices, posts the job ads, and runs the social accounts. There's no marketing person. There's no finance person. There's Dana. We'll follow her through all five.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
Act 1 — The Model
Who you hire.
Fast
Routine tasks. Chasing an overdue invoice, drafting a routine email.
Balanced
Most day-to-day work. Proposals, job posts, first drafts.
Senior
Judgment calls. Deciding whether to bid a contract that needs three more crew.
Smarter costs more, same as people. Even the top tier is a rounding error next to a salary.
In practice
You're not hiring three people. Same hire, every role — that lands in Act 3.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
Act 2 — The Base Prompt
Orientation day.
Who the company is, what you do, who your customers are, how you talk. Every hire gets it once, regardless of role.
Not too much. Just enough. Overload it and you bury what counts. This is the re-explaining you never do again.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
Act 3 — Projects & Skills
The training manual.
Four tests for a good first job:
- It recurs
- It's made of words
- You can describe what "good" looks like
- A mistake is recoverable
In practice
Dana's four all pass — proposals, collections emails, job ads, social posts. Deciding which contracts to bid doesn't. It fails test four, for now.
"
You are not hiring four people. You are writing four job descriptions for the one person you already hired ten minutes ago.
Proposal writer. Collections clerk. Recruiter. Social manager. Different folder, different hat, same hire.
Name two or three of those roles in your own business.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
The feedback loop
A loop, not a launch.
01
Write instructions
02
Try the work
03
See what's missing
04
Add context & fix
You'll rewrite this two or three times before it feels right. That isn't the tool being bad — that's what training anyone looks like. The difference is this hire learns in thirty seconds and never forgets.
And you read the first several outputs before you let any new project run unsupervised. Costs nothing. That's a habit, not a permission.
"Onboarding" implies an end. This doesn't have one.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
Act 4 — Connectors
Giving them equipment.
Without
A consultant.
It can tell you what the collections email should say.
With
An employee.
It looks up who actually hasn't paid, drafts the email to that client, and puts it in front of you.
That gap is the whole difference between a chat box and an employee.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
Same day, new desk
What you actually hand over.
The real equivalents: a connected inbox, calendar access, the invoicing system, a place to leave drafts. None of it is exotic — it's the same handful of things you'd hand any new hire on day one.
In practice
Dana hooks up email and the invoicing system, and the collections project stops being a writing exercise and starts being work that's actually done.
01Model
02Base Prompt
03Projects
04Connectors
05Access
Act 5 — Access Judgment
The calls only you can make.
Read
"Look at the files, don't touch anything."
Draft
"Write it up and leave it on my desk."
Draft, don't send. Most small businesses should live there for a good long while. That's not a limitation — it's good management. You already make these calls: who gets a company card, who can see payroll, who has keys.
In practice — Dana's calls
Customer emailDraft
CalendarRead
Financials / invoicingRead
Job adsDraft
SocialDraft
Where the metaphor breaks · 1 of 2
Two ways this isn't really a hire.
No accountability
Responsibility for anything it produces stays with you, permanently.
No initiative
It works inside what you asked. It will not tell you you're solving the wrong problem.
Where the metaphor breaks · 2 of 2
And two more.
Total memory loss
It only remembers what's written down. Everything else evaporates.
Confidently wrong
Unlike a new hire, it usually won't signal uncertainty. The strongest argument for "draft, don't send."
Five questions to carry out of this room
This is a discernment exercise, not a technical one.
Discernment isn't a special skill — it's the habit of asking the right questions before you hand something over. Ask these before you hand it the pen.
01Does it inform my judgment, or replace it?
02Am I getting sharper, or more dependent?
03Is it pulling me toward people, or away from them?
04Am I protecting what should be private and clarifying what should be transparent?
05Who else does this serve, not just me?
The news, in order
GOODAI will not replace humans.
BADIt will eliminate some work and some jobs currently done by humans.
GOODIt will create jobs that don't exist yet.
NETHumans who use AI well will replace humans who don't.
Setting up an AI agent is exactly like onboarding a new employee — except this hire costs less than your phone bill, never quits, and can be retrained into a completely different specialist in the time it takes to open a new folder.
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