you're getting 10% out of your AI

How to get past treating your agent like a chatbot, and what to build instead.

July 22, 2026

I spent hundreds of hours inside Hermes, our agent, and the biggest waste I see is people running it like a fancier ChatGPT. Ask a question, read the answer, move on. Do that and you pull maybe 5 to 10% of what it can do.

One shift changed how I use it. The real output is the artifact, not the answer.

When I ask my agent something, I don't stop at the reply. I ask it to turn the reply into something my team can hold: a checklist, a one-page PDF, a diagram, an HTML file, a short-form video outline. A private answer helps me for thirty seconds. An artifact helps ten people for a month, and my other agents can read it too.

If you want the loops but not the build, that's what we do at Single Brain. My team stands them up inside your business, memory and stop rules included, so the system compounds without you wiring it yourself. You can see it at singlebrain.com.

Small example from this week. I was looking at our X analytics: 3.1 million views last month, on track for 1.6 million this month. I didn't want a lecture. I asked the agent to build the recovery plan as a shareable doc, with candidate posts my team could react to. Now the whole team works off one file instead of my memory.

A picture moves faster than a paragraph. When I share one idea as a diagram, people get it and they act on it. When I keep it as a chat reply buried in my history, it dies with me.

So the practice is boring and it works: anything worth saying twice, ask your agent to make it into an artifact. Then share the artifact itself. If the same artifact keeps showing up, turn it into a skill so anyone can run it without you.

You are one person. Your calendar caps out. Artifacts are how your thinking keeps working after you close the laptop.

If you want to see me do this live, back and forth, the full 20-minute walkthrough is here.

To building things your team can hold,

Eric Siu