Agent Systems
Architecture and operating patterns for orchestration, memory, context, verification, permissions, and multi-agent coordination.
Field notes
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Goodhart's Law Doesn't Need an Optimizer
Diagnose gates that stay green while the property they represent drifts away, even when no agent is actively gaming the metric.
The Review Spawn Threshold: Automated Review Is a Producer of Work
Treat automated review as a feedback loop and add an admission threshold before every finding becomes more agent work.
The Sandbox Is Not the Boundary
Separate process containment from credential authority, then enforce the limits that continue traveling after a request leaves the sandbox.
Cost Per Completed Task: Instrumenting Agent Spend Attribution
Attribute every unit of agent spend to a task, role, retry, and verified outcome so provider totals become an operational signal.
What Actually Ports When You Change Agent Harnesses
Inventory what moves cleanly, what needs rewriting, and what silently degrades when an agent system changes harnesses.
Spend Authority for Agents: The Wallet Is Not the Hard Part
Define what an agent may buy, with which credential, under which limits, before attaching autonomous software to payment rails.
The Harness That Edits Its Own Agents
Run a meta-agent that audits and edits role instructions while preserving a boundary around the rules that must remain enforced in code.
Agents Don't Fit Workflow Engines: Replay Is the Wrong Primitive
See why deterministic replay creates new agent work and side effects, and why durable agent systems need bounded resume semantics instead.
The Harness Floor: First-Turn Token Overhead Is Rent
Itemize the fixed context cost paid before an agent reads the task, then decide which instructions and tool schemas deserve space in every session.
Skills Are Dependencies Now
Treat third-party agent skills like executable dependencies by pinning, auditing, reviewing updates, and constraining their permissions.
Your Verifier Can't See What Compaction Deleted
Verify against artifacts outside the compacted transcript so review does not inherit the omissions of lossy context compression.
Your Agent Harness Is an Unpinned Dependency
Treat auto-updating harnesses, model aliases, and vendor defaults as mutable dependencies whose behavior must be pinned or continuously verified.
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