On Agent Collaboration

The ceiling of AI collaboration is the ceiling of the person. Once output is no longer scarce, what is scarce is judgment and taste.

On Agent Collaboration, slide 1: the question the whole deck answers: how rules stay in force on an executor that has no memory. On Agent Collaboration, slide 2: I Constraints · No memory, no consequences, many instances. With all three true at once, continuity cannot live in the session; only text and channels can hold it. On Agent Collaboration, slide 3: I Constraints · Once continuity moves out of the session, the machine takes this shape. Text and channels are the persistent layer, the session is disposable; the point is not a more reliable session but one that takes nothing with it when it dies. On Agent Collaboration, slide 4: I Constraints · One constraint, three kinds of engineering forced into the same solutions. Distributed systems, written law and principal-agent theory have nothing to do with one another, yet converge on the same solutions. Constraints decide shape more than fields do. On Agent Collaboration, slide 5: II Establishment · An Agent is established by a mandate, and the mandate answers five questions: why it exists, in whose guise, how far it reaches, where it may not cross, how it delivers. Reach is authority; the line it may not cross is the forbidden zone. On Agent Collaboration, slide 6: II Establishment · A persona is anchored to a specific person; a string of adjectives will not hold it. Prohibitions only remove behavior, and a persona built from prohibitions makes every Agent taste the same; a counterpart can be questioned, turning a normative question into a simulation question that has a test. On Agent Collaboration, slide 7: III Text · The text loaded before a session starts work comes in four layers: charter, Bylaws, working notes, entry file, from highest force to lowest; plus an archive that only takes in. On Agent Collaboration, slide 8: III Text · Which book a rule goes into depends on the range in which it holds. Holds across projects: Bylaws. Holds only in this project: working notes. Holds only for one deliverable: the blueprint. If you cannot read it all, declare the range. On Agent Collaboration, slide 9: IV Legislation · Under every bylaw there is an accident. Four parts: carries, ailment, law, limit. The limit is the hard threshold: if you cannot say where the law would wrongly block a reasonable judgment, make no law, keep only the ailment. On Agent Collaboration, slide 10: IV Legislation · Under one label, there are often two quantities. Reachability, coverage, blocking, count, installed: one label, two measurements. The name of a criterion is not its definition; one name binds to one question only. On Agent Collaboration, slide 11: IV Legislation · The other six, one matter each: the test rig must pass acceptance; idling looks the same as passing; suspect the implementation before the definition; an anomaly report must carry a baseline; a number has only two sources; must-be-synced is not authorization. On Agent Collaboration, slide 12: V Working notes · Working notes are not law; they are pits fallen into and techniques tested. Forty-odd entries in four kinds: how sessions talk to each other, sharing one code tree, this pipeline's temperament, and method. The method entries are worth the most. On Agent Collaboration, slide 13: V Working notes · The five on method. Measure the premises before stopping to ask; after two rounds of guessing let the code speak; same conclusion with a new reason gets said separately; a comment states intent not behavior; when the response is not monotonic, a passing value has rolled a good number. On Agent Collaboration, slide 14: V Working notes · Acceptance of a deliverable must include using it once, for real. Every check passed, none caught it, a person opened it and it crashed; static checks cannot answer whether it runs, and reading the source to confirm a path exists is no substitute for running it. On Agent Collaboration, slide 15: VI Correction · The book corrects itself. Old conclusions are marked repealed, never deleted, because deletion makes the record look as if it had always been right; an invisible repeal is no repeal, and a later session will restore it out of good intentions. On Agent Collaboration, slide 16: VI Correction · The evidence is real, but it covers less than the conclusion. Path, check and definition are three shapes of the same rule: the height of a conclusion may not exceed the height of its evidence. On Agent Collaboration, slide 17: VII Forbidden zones · There are only three, and they fall on three substitutions. Usurpation, performance and bureaucratization are each something observable passing itself off as something unobservable; the test is whether an action is for what something is or for how it looks. On Agent Collaboration, slide 18: VII Forbidden zones · Looking rigorous used to be expensive. Now it is free. The marginal cost of annotations and disclaimers approaches zero, so careful and performed output look alike; the only way to make the signal expensive again is to accept only what can be falsified. On Agent Collaboration, slide 19: VIII Restatement · Two questions to keep asking. The first-principles answer drifts, and while it drifts no criterion turns red; over-engineering is the means replacing the end. On Agent Collaboration, slide 20: closing. The Agent will not remember this charter. Next time, it will be loaded again.