Running an estate with a fleet of agents

A session per repository keeps agents from trampling each other and leaves them no way to talk. These are the posts about everything that follows from that: the handoffs, the checking, the documents, and knowing when to take one off the job.

10 posts

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Isolated sessions, the issue tracker that became the way they talk, and deciding which one needs me next.

  1. Ready for humanI run a coding session per repository and they can't talk to each other. For a while the thing carrying messages between them was me, and I kept getting it wrong. Campfire
  2. Which one needs me nextA dozen agent sessions running at once is not a capacity problem. Working out which of them is stuck is, and the obvious way to find out is the wrong one. Campfire
  3. A Slack channel with nobody in itI asked nine agent sessions to stop compiling for forty minutes. What came back read like a team of colleagues, and I haven't worked out what to do about that. Soapbox

Checking what they claim

A green suite from an agent proves little until the test has been seen failing, a confident reading of stale code proves nothing, and a session two days in is worth taking off the job.

  1. Prove the bug before you fix itA model handed a bug will hand you back a plausible fix and a green test suite in about a minute. That tells you almost nothing. Campfire
  2. Check the code you're reading is currentI was a minute from filing a fix for a feature that had shipped the day before. The reason I had not noticed turned out to be a rule of my own, doing precisely what I told it to. Campfire
  3. What happens when an AI burns outA Claude session ran for two days, stopped listening and got my hand-written code backwards. So I took it off the job, and asked for a proper handover first. Campfire

Where the written record lives

Repository, wiki or microsite, and the skills that were too revealing to publish.

  1. Three places a document can liveA spec, a how-to and a README walk into a repo. Only one of them should still be there in six months. Campfire
  2. What I took back off the shelfI put my working practice on a public shelf, and then took some of it back off again. Working out which half was the interesting part. Campfire

Deciding what to build

A market analysis before a line of code, and an order that puts building your own last.

  1. I went looking for the reason not to build itThe requirements were done and I hadn't written a line of code. So I spent a day trying to talk myself out of the whole thing. Campfire
  2. Building it yourself is the third thing I tryI built somebody else's idea into a working skill before nine and deleted it by ten. Not-invented-here is the accusation; here's the order I actually work in. Soapbox

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