What is an AI worker fleet?
A worker fleet is the set of AI workers running in one account, each doing one narrow job with its own key and its own app permissions.
The instinct with a capable model is to build one assistant that does everything. The pattern that survives contact with production is the opposite: **several narrow workers, one job each.**
One broad worker vs a fleet of narrow ones
| One worker, many jobs | A fleet of narrow workers | |
|---|---|---|
| Access it holds | The union of every job's needs | Only what its one job needs |
| A bad run affects | Everything it touches | One job |
| Switching it off | Loses all the jobs | Loses one |
| Debugging a mistake | Which of nine jobs was it doing? | The receipt is about one job |
| Instruction | Long, conditional, brittle | Short, testable |
| Cost of adding a job | Rewrite and re-test the whole thing | Add a worker |
The access row is the one that decides it. A worker doing nine jobs needs the union of nine permission sets, so every job runs with the reach of all the others. The triage job holds CRM write access it never needs, because the CRM job does.
What the plans allow
| Plan | Workers | Tool calls a day |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 5 | 500 |
| Pro | 50 | 5,000 |
| Team | 500 | 50,000, pooled |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
Free allowing five workers rather than one is deliberate and is the whole argument in a number: a single-worker free tier would push you toward the broad worker on day one and teach the wrong pattern.
Team's tool calls are pooled across the account rather than divided per seat, so a busy worker draws on the whole allowance instead of starving on its own share.
A real fleet, costed
Four kits from the directory, each doing one job:
| Worker | Apps | Starts on | Tool calls a day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Executive Daily Briefing | calendar, email, tasks | Daily | ~15 |
| Engineering Pulse | github | Daily | ~20 |
| Support Inbox Triager | email, tasks | Hourly | ~120 |
| Follow-Up Tracker | email, tasks | Daily | ~25 |
That is about 180 tool calls a day, four of Free's five worker slots, and comfortably inside Free's 500. A real working fleet fits on the free plan, which is worth knowing before assuming a fleet implies a bill.
What pushes an account to Pro is usually frequency and log retention rather than headcount: moving triage to every 15 minutes roughly quadruples its share, and Free keeps only 1 day of receipts against Pro's 30.
Why narrow jobs are easier to trust
Each worker in that table has its own key and its own grants. Three consequences follow, and they compound:
- Blast radius is bounded by design. The briefing worker holds Read on three apps and can change nothing. If its instruction drifts, the worst case is a bad summary.
- Switching one off is cheap. Suspicion about the triager does not cost you the morning brief, so you actually act on the suspicion.
- Receipts are legible. A receipt for a worker with one job answers "did it do the job". A receipt for a worker with nine answers "here is a list of things that happened".
The failure mode: fleet sprawl
The problem with fleets is not technical, it is that they accumulate.
Eighteen months in, an account has twenty-two workers. Four do nearly the same thing because three people each built one. Two were built by someone who has left. One is switched off and nobody remembers why, and nobody will switch it back on in case that reason mattered.
Nothing failed. There was simply never a moment that forced anyone to describe the estate. This is the same shape as private kit sprawl and has the same cheap discipline: **every worker states its one job in a sentence, and if it needs two sentences it is two workers.**
The other half is a periodic read of what exists. A fleet is infrastructure, and infrastructure nobody inventories is infrastructure nobody can reason about.
The reasonable objection
"Five narrow workers mean five instructions to maintain and five sets of permissions. One worker is less work."
True on day one and false by month three. The maintenance argument assumes the instructions stay independent, which is exactly what narrowness buys: changing the triage rules touches one short instruction, where in the broad worker it means editing a long conditional document and re-testing the eight jobs you did not intend to change.
The permissions point inverts too. Five grants of two apps each is more clicks than one grant of six apps, and it is the version where you can answer "what can this thing reach" without reading a spec.
When one worker is genuinely right
- The steps are one job. A multi-step sequence with a single definition of done is one worker, not four. Splitting by step rather than by job is the opposite mistake.
- The jobs share all their state. If two jobs only make sense reading each other's working memory, they are one job.
- You are prototyping. Prove the job is real, then split it.
The test is the sentence: if you can state what it does without "and", it is one worker.
FAQ
How many AI workers can I run?
Five on Free, 50 on Pro, 500 on Team, and custom on Enterprise. Free's five is deliberate: a real fleet of four narrow workers fits inside the free plan with room to spare.
Should I build one AI agent or several?
Several, each doing one job. A single broad agent needs the union of every job's permissions, so every job runs with the reach of all the others, and one bad run affects everything it touches. Narrow workers bound the blast radius and make receipts legible.
Does a fleet of workers cost more than one?
Not necessarily, because cost tracks work rather than headcount. Four workers doing about 180 tool calls a day fit inside Free's 500. What pushes an account up a tier is usually run frequency and log retention. See /pricing.
Do workers in a fleet share access or memory?
No. Each worker has its own key, its own per-app grants and its own memory. A fact relevant to several workers has to be given to each, which is what stops a wrong fact or an over-broad permission from spreading across the fleet.
How do I stop a fleet becoming unmanageable?
Make every worker state its one job in a sentence, and treat a worker needing two sentences as two workers. Then read the estate periodically: sprawl is an inventory problem rather than a technical one, and it accumulates silently because nothing ever fails.