BrianCharlesSmith

An agent builds exactly as well as the plan it was handed, so every piece of work starts as a written plan: the goal, the guardrails, what's out of scope, what success looks like, and acceptance criteria that each name the command that proves them.

Before the build starts, a fresh agent that has never seen the conversation attacks the plan, looking for every way it could be built wrong while still passing what's written, because ambiguity is cheap to fix in a plan and expensive to fix in a build. Then each check runs against the untouched code, and any criterion that already passes gets thrown out, since it could never have failed.

Running six agents at once is management work. Every one of them needs an assignment it can't misread and the context to carry it out, reviewers work through their own slices of the change in parallel, and every build gets an adversarial review from an agent that didn't write it.

The culture is written down: commit format, branch names, conventions and the reasons behind them live in instruction files that every session inherits and follows without being asked. The tooling asks me for very little, and when it does ask it matters, because a system that prompts for everything trains you to click yes and the prompt that mattered slides through with the rest.

Agents will build whatever you describe, which makes deciding what deserves to exist the scarce skill. Taking Cruina and Omniira from an idea to production taught me to start from the person using the thing and to keep a picture of where the product should be a year out, so this week's work points somewhere. It also taught me to know where the money comes from and what each customer costs to serve.

There's room to be creative too. Omniira began as an experiment in whether AI characters could hold real memories, and it grew a government and an economy because the vision kept outgrowing the prototype.

Some of my rules are culture, which can bend for a turn when I say so, and some are floor, enforced in code where no instruction reaches. A session can work across every repository and ship to stage on its own, and it can't read a secret or touch production even if I tell it to halfway through a session.