Agent components: trigger, condition, and action

The idea

Every agent has a trigger that activates it, a condition that validates it, and an action it takes.

You already use agents. You use them every morning when your alarm goes off and you check whether it is a weekday before getting out of bed. You use them when a Slack notification appears and you glance at the channel name before deciding whether to open it. You use them when someone asks "do you have a minute?" and you assess your current workload before answering.

An example

You design an agent for email triage: trigger — a new message lands in your inbox. Condition — the sender is not in your contacts and the subject contains a request. Action — move it to a 'Review Friday' folder. Without the condition, every email gets deferred. Without the trigger, the rule never fires. Without the action, you have built a sensor that watches but never responds. All three components must be present for the agent to function.

Where it goes wrong

Building agents with missing components. A trigger without a condition fires indiscriminately — you respond to every notification regardless of context. A condition without a trigger never activates — you have a brilliant rule that waits forever for a cue you never specified. An action without a trigger and condition is just a behavior you perform randomly. Most broken personal systems fail because one of the three components is implicit, vague, or missing entirely.

Make it stick

This week, design one new agent using explicit trigger-condition-action structure. Write it down in the format: 'WHEN [specific cue], IF [validation check], THEN [concrete action].' Post it where you will encounter the trigger. After three days, evaluate: Did the trigger fire? Did the condition catch the right cases? Did the action produce the outcome you wanted? Revise any component that underperformed.