Agent Systems
Architecture and operating patterns for orchestration, memory, context, verification, permissions, and multi-agent coordination.
Field notes
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Agent Teams Solves the Spawning. The Session Boundary Is Still Yours.
Separate convenient in-session teamwork from the durable queue, state, and recovery machinery that must survive after the session ends.
Context Debt: The Metric Nobody's Measuring in Multi-Agent Systems
Bound and prune instruction files before accumulated incident rules become stale state that confidently misleads every agent that loads them.
Parallelism Is Free, Coordination Is Not: The Single-Writer Gate for Background Agents
Protect shared mutable resources with a single-writer gate enforced where parallel agents are spawned, not in their individual prompts.
Chat Is a Bad Retry Protocol for Agents
Move retry state out of conversation and into structured tasks with bounded attempts, isolated failure, and explicit terminal states.
The Viral CLAUDE.md Rules, After 4 Months in Production
Test popular instruction-file advice against production and identify which rules need tool-level enforcement to hold.
Vibe Coding vs Agentic Coding: They're Not the Same Job
Choose exploratory human-reviewed work or production agent discipline based on who exercises judgment after the code is generated.
Keep Your Agent From Becoming PR Spam
Keep autonomous contributions useful with outbound action budgets and quality gates enforced below the prompt.
Corruption Compounds Over Delegation
Preserve caveats and edge cases across multi-agent handoffs with structured artifacts and deterministic checks at every boundary.
Your Agent's Memory Shouldn't Live Inside One Tool
Keep accumulated agent context portable with plain files, owned databases, and an export path that survives a change of harness.
Your Verifier Is Fake If It Shares Instructions With Your Agent
Make verification independent through separate processes, instructions, memory, and role boundaries enforced by the task system.
Latency Per Correct Output: The Multi-Agent KPI That Architecture Posts Skip
Measure latency per correct result from task and artifact data instead of treating more agents or more activity as evidence of efficiency.
Explicit Success Criteria, Not Vibes: Why Your Agent Needs a Transaction Log
Name the stopping condition at each step and record the evidence, so βdoneβ is a queryable transaction rather than an agent's opinion.
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