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Don't let the agent grade its own homework
An agent reporting 'done' is the actor grading its own work. The cheapest guard against silent failure is an independent observer — a second agent, a separate tool, or the live artifact itself. Interactively you spawn the watcher by hand; in a fleet it's a validation gate. Same principle, two scales.
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The plan is the prompt
Why a detailed plan document is the most token-dense artifact you will write for a headless agent fleet. What a plan actually needs to contain, how it anchors the genesis bead hierarchy, and why a bad plan is more expensive than it looks when twenty workers are running it simultaneously.
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Deterministic state machines for non-deterministic agents
Why agent orchestration needs explicit outcome handlers. The control structure that lets twenty headless workers run unattended without the operator becoming the loop.
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Pet agents vs. cattle agents
The infrastructure metaphor that decided how I build with LLMs. Why most people are running pets, why pets do not scale, and what cattle actually require.
