The 5R Employee Canvas
A one-page way to scope an AI agent like you’d onboard a person.
A reusable canvas that designs an AI agent across five dimensions: its role, the rules it follows, the resources and reach it needs, the practice it takes to get good, and how it runs in production. It turns a vague "let’s build an agent" into something concrete and teachable.
The problem
People rush to build agents without first deciding what the agent is for, what it’s allowed to do, or how it fits into real work. The result is brittle, over-scoped, or unsafe systems.
The approach
I borrowed the mental model of hiring and onboarding a person and mapped it onto agent design, then reduced it to five prompts that fit on a single page. Deliberately tool-agnostic so it survives model and tooling churn, and it splits cleanly into personal and enterprise use.
The outcome
A reusable backbone for hands-on sessions that lets non-engineers reason clearly about agents before touching any tools.