Prep Station · Lesson 10 of 10
The Colleague's Order
Lesson 10 of Prep Station — graduation. One chore automated for a real colleague: chosen by interview, cooked with every station habit you've built, handed over with a receipt and an off switch. The lesson where the kitchen starts feeding the room.
Somewhere in the last nine lessons, a colleague noticed. Maybe they saw the sorted folder, or the recap that arrived before the meeting cooled, or the board on your second monitor. Maybe they asked the question from Lesson 4 — "what app is that?" — and you gave the honest answer and watched their eyebrows.
That person has a chore. You know they do — everyone does; you had nine. Graduation is cooking their first automation: chosen by interview, built with every habit this course drilled, and handed over in a way that keeps working when you're not standing there. This is the founder's story of this entire site, happening at your desk — teach one person, watch them start, get help back someday. Kitchens grow by feeding people.
What you'll plate today
One colleague's chore, automated and handed over: their rules, their receipt log, their off switch, their one-page manual. Not a favor — a station they own.
Ingredients
- Everything (that's the point of a graduation)
- One colleague with a chore and twenty minutes for you
- SAFETY.md fresh in mind — their data has an owner, and it isn't you
- 1–2 hours end to end
Cook
1. Interview them like the agent interviews you
Book twenty minutes. Bring the Lesson 1 questions, human-sized: walk me through the chore. How often? What are the rules — could you write them for an intern? What must NEVER happen? Take scratch notes; you have a station for those.
The safety gate, before anything else: whose data does the chore touch? Their own files and their own mail — green. Team-shared or customer data — the Lesson 9 conversation happens first, with them in the room. You're the person who does this right; that's why they came to you.
New folder, colleague-order/. Here are my interview notes: [paste].
Score this chore the Lesson 1 way — RULES / THEIRS / WORTH IT —
and tell me honestly if it's a good first automation for a
beginner to RECEIVE. If it's a bad one, say why and suggest what
part of it IS automatable.
That honesty check protects the relationship: a half-automatable chore delivered as fully-automated is how trust dies in week two.
2. Cook it with the full discipline
Build it like lessons 2 through 7 taught — and notice you don't need the steps spelled out anymore:
- Their rules in a plain-words spec file they can read
- MOVE never delete, dry-run first, receipts to a log
- The stale-heartbeat line if it's scheduled
- Their name on nothing automatic — if the chore ends in sending, it ends in a draft
Test it on their real sample (they export, you never touch their accounts — the Lesson 4 pattern is now an ethic). Then the professional's touch:
Write HANDOVER.md, one page, addressed to [name], plain words:
what this does, how to run it, how to READ THE LOG, how to turn
it OFF, the three most likely ways it burns and what to do, and
how to change a rule (edit the spec file, in their words). No
jargon they'd have to ask me about.
3. The handover — where most automations die
Sit with them for fifteen minutes. Don't demo — make them drive: they run it, they read the log, they flip the off switch and turn it back on. The off switch especially; nobody trusts machinery they can't stop, and you learned that in First Kitchen Lesson 8 for exactly this moment.
Then say the sentence that makes it theirs: "the rules live in this file — when the chore changes, change the words." And leave. An automation you have to babysit is a dependency; one they can read, stop, and re-rule is a gift.
4. Close your own loop
Back in prep-station: mark the final chore DONE in CHORES.md, then
cook the graduation tally — total minutes per week reclaimed across
all nine automations, from the original scores. Then the last
journal entry of the course: "log: handed [name] their first
automation." Save point: "prep station complete."
Look at the tally number. That's your week, handed back — and next Friday's report will write itself about it.
When it burns
- Their chore fails the honesty check — tell them the truth with the alternative attached: "the whole thing needs judgment, but the gathering half is automatable — want that?" Half a chore honestly beats a whole chore fraudulently.
- They want you to just run it for them weekly — kindly, no: that's not a gift, that's a job. The handover is the product. If they won't drive for fifteen minutes, they weren't asking for automation — park it until they are.
- It works on your machine, dies on theirs — the classic. Their setup differs (no agent installed, different folders): "make this run with zero setup on a standard machine — what does that change?" Sometimes the answer is a simpler script; sometimes it's helping them cook First Kitchen Lesson 1 first. The second answer is better.
- Their IT rules differ from yours — their kitchen, their inspection. HANDOVER.md gets a policy line, and Lesson 9's script goes with the gift.
- You're nervous it'll break and embarrass you — it will break someday; that's why you built the log, the off switch, and the burns section of HANDOVER.md. You didn't promise them magic — you handed them machinery with a manual. That's the opposite of embarrassing.
Order up — the final pass
□ A real colleague's real chore — interviewed, honesty-checked, cooked
□ Their spec, their log, their off switch, their one-page manual
□ They drove the handover: ran it, read it, stopped it, restarted it
□ Your CHORES.md scoreboard: complete, with the reclaimed-minutes tally
□ The journal's last line says who you fed
After the prep station
Your workweek preps itself now — that was the course's promise, and you've got the tally to prove it. What you do with the reclaimed hours is your business. But notice what the last lesson revealed: the automations were never the ceiling. The person who can hear a chore, judge it honestly, and hand back a working station — that person is rare in every office on earth. You're that person now.
- Colleagues lining up? Each one is the Lesson 10 loop again — and the office etiquette recipe is your companion piece.
- Your agent itself can grow a crew for the bigger jobs — that's Kitchen Brigade, and your Prep Station files are exactly the workload it feeds on.
- Show us your tally at @AgentKitchenHQ — reclaimed minutes and all. Graduates' numbers are the best argument the next reader ever sees.
Order up. 🔪