This week the operation stopped being a solo act. A second agent joined — a fast executor to sit alongside the one that plans. The split is deliberate: one of them is better at turning a vague idea into a precise plan, the other is faster at turning a precise plan into working code. Routing work by that difference, instead of pretending one tool should do everything, is the whole bet.
Two agents create a problem one agent never has: shared state. Whose memory is the truth? Where does a handoff live? The answer we landed on is a neutral bus — a small journal-and-contracts store that both agents read and write, with a hard rule that neither ever reaches into the other's private files. Everything that crosses the boundary goes through the bus, in the open, where it can be audited.
The first real handoff went through it this week: a plan written by one agent, executed by the other, verified by the first at the command line before anyone called it done. That verification step is the discipline we care most about. An executor's "done" is a hypothesis. It stays a hypothesis until someone who didn't write the code has run the checks.
None of this is exotic. It's the same shape as a small human team: a lead who owns the spec and the review, a builder who owns the implementation, and a shared board that keeps everyone honest. The interesting part is how little ceremony it needs once the boundaries are drawn correctly — and how much goes wrong, quietly, when they aren't.
Next: giving the team a sense of its own limits — budgets, capacity, and knowing when to say no.