Hartley & Vaughn Construction
Every assignment in From Zero to AI Agents That Do The Work plays out in the same folder: the administration of a construction company with five permanent staff. Some thirty folders, around a hundred documents, and twelve rules the company is supposed to follow.
Each rule is broken exactly once, and nowhere does it say where. Your AI agent finds them, chapter by chapter.
Why a construction company
A web of agreements
Jobs refer to clients, clients to invoices, invoices to hours, hours to people, and people to certificates with an expiry date. Exactly what an agent can trace and you cannot.
No trade knowledge needed
Everyone understands that a certificate has to be valid before you go up the scaffolding. You do not need to know anything about construction.
Swap in your own work
A school, a caterer, an accounting office: every organisation has work with agreements in it. Swap the construction company for what you do; the rest reads the same.
What is in the folder
An administration like every company has, with fields at the top of each document: a job has a number, a client, an amount and a date. That is what lets an agent calculate with it.
- jobs
- clients
- quotes
- estimates
- extra work
- invoices
- timesheets
- staff
- certificates
- equipment
- subcontractors
- purchasing
- stores
- diary
- tenders
- permits
- quality assurance
- complaints
- aftercare
Five of the twelve rules
- Every job has a number, running up and with no gaps.
- Extra work above $1,000 is confirmed in writing beforehand.
- Whoever carries out a job holds a valid certificate for that work on that date.
- Lifting and climbing plant is only used with a valid inspection.
- A stage invoice goes out within fourteen days of the stage.
Four assignments from the book
Every chapter ends with an assignment you do yourself: one sentence to your own AI agent, and an outcome you can count.
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chapter 1 · The tools first, then the thing
“This is the administration of a construction company. Describe in ten lines which business processes you can see here, then name three things that stand out to you.”
A list from acquisition to aftercare, and three remarks. Watch the third: it is often about something you had never looked at, such as a gap in the job numbering.
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chapter 4 · Facts, not opinions
“complaints/ holds reports from clients. For each one, separate what is an observation from what is a judgment, and for every observation find the date and the file it comes from.”
Four complaints pulled apart, and a procedure on disk that offers itself the next time.
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chapter 9 · Checking itself
“In the staff file, change one hyphen into a space in the name of a certificate. Then run rule 5 again and tell me what changes and why.”
From four violations to eight, and the four new ones look entirely credible. That is how you learn to distrust a check that comes back green.
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chapter 16 · Look for the key, not the doors
“Search this whole folder for every field holding a date after which something no longer holds, whatever it is called, and put them on one list, sorted by date, marking which have already expired.”
Thirty-six expiry dates across six folders. Nine have already expired, including a quote still marked open that nobody can accept any more.
You make the folder yourself, with one instruction
There is nothing to download. The book gives the instruction with which your agent creates the whole administration, and tells you what to check when it is done. Your folder will look different from mine, and that is the point: the method does not depend on a file name.