course module
Factory. Agents. Skills. Tools.
FAST means Factory of Agents with Skills and Tools. Factory is the operating model. Agents, Skills, Tools are the capability layers. Order matters — build the factory first.
Sandbox
course module
FAST means Factory of Agents with Skills and Tools. Factory is the operating model. Agents, Skills, Tools are the capability layers. Order matters — build the factory first.
Factory — are you set up to ship agents on a repeatable cadence, with a single owner per pipeline? Agents — who's doing the work? (human-in-the-loop vs autonomous) Skills — what does the agent need to know to do it well? Tools — what infrastructure does the skill plug into?
The order is the strategy. Most automation programs run it in reverse — they start with Tools ("we just bought n8n"), invent a Skill to justify the tool, hire or assign an Agent, then desperately reverse-engineer the Factory… by which point they have five disconnected tools and no operating model. That's how you end up with five tools and zero automations.
Factory is the operating model. FAST means running your business as a Factory of agents, not a string of one-off automations.
Factory asks two questions:
Without Factory, A/S/T become disconnected tools nobody runs. With Factory, every ship gets faster than the last.
Decide: human-in-the-loop, supervised agent, or autonomous?
Choosing the wrong tier is why "agents don't work" — autonomous on a high-stakes task burns trust; human-in-the-loop on a low-stakes task burns your time.
Skills are the capabilities the agent needs. The portable knowledge.
For a lead-nurture pipeline: knowledge of your product, your tone of voice, your existing email templates, your pain-point library. Captured as markdown SKILL.md files the agent can read.
Skills are agent-agnostic. Build them once, swap the underlying agent later.
Tools are connections — how the skill plugs into the world.
For lead nurture: Resend (for sending), your CRM (for contact data), your portal (for source data on the lead). Plumbing, not strategy.
Most people start at T. That's the trap. Start at F.
Action in 10 minutes: Write a one-sentence Factory statement for your next pipeline — what does it ship, on what cadence, who owns it? If you can't compress it to one sentence, the pipeline isn't ready yet.