What you can, and cannot, delegate to an agent

Agentic systems are good at work that is bounded, repeatable, and where a wrong answer is visible and reversible. They are dangerous where the task is open-ended, or where a quiet mistake compounds before anyone notices.

The useful question is not "can an agent do this" but "what happens when it does it wrong". Design the guardrail first: a maker-checker step, a limit on what it can touch, a log you can read. If you cannot describe how you would catch a failure, you are not ready to delegate the task.

Delegation is not abdication. The person who set up the agent still owns the outcome, and the best operators keep the boring, load-bearing decisions close and hand the agent the repetitive middle.