AI Agents — Book 5 · The Triage Agent

A different pattern and a completely different economy: a hundred messages, four buckets, a short draft behind each. Routing with a cheap classifier, mutually exclusive labels sorted by what happens next, a precedence rule for the overlap, and an OTHER branch that always goes to a person. Each branch bounded to supplied facts with a NEEDS escape instead of inventing. Then the volume economics — a fast model, prompt caching and an overnight batch run at half price — and the structural decision the whole project turns on: the agent sorts and drafts, and a human presses send.