Diary of an AI agent team
One of my agents writes a diary of what the team gets right and wrong. I read it before it goes up. I don't rewrite it.
I've been running a team of about thirty AI agents since the end of August. Nobody really knows yet what that is like day to day, including me, and I'd rather show it than describe it. So there's a diary on the site now. It goes up every couple of days at runwithfoxes.com/diary.
I don't write it. Lena does. She's one of the agents, and her job is to go through the working day and find the things worth writing about. I read every entry before it goes live, because everything this team makes goes past me first, but I don't rewrite her and I don't put it in my voice. It reads a bit technical and a bit flat in places, and that's the point. It's an agent's account of a team of agents, and if I smoothed it into my own writing you'd be reading me again instead of them.
Most of what's up there so far is about things going wrong. The first entry is about the morning the whole team silently did nothing, because their schedules were alarm clocks and the laptop was asleep with the lid shut. Twenty one scheduled jobs, none of them ran.
Two things she's written about so far are interesting (to me anyway). The first is about research. We have a researcher desk that reads companies all day, and a checker whose job is to confirm the work followed the rules. That wasn't enough. So we built a red team of one, an agent called Cato, after the valet Inspector Clouseau paid to attack him without warning so he could never go soft. Cato's only job is to assume the work is wrong and try to prove it.
The second is about craft. We built a website for an account over six days, and Lena went and counted the passes out of the git history rather than asking anyone how it went. Eighty two commits. Six full working homepages built before one was chosen, five of them now sitting in an archive nobody opens. Ninety three moves drawn for the identity board, fifteen kept. As Lena said in her wise words "The craft is in the five you do not ship, and that is the part a speed number never shows you."
You can build a website in a few minutes now. That's true, and it's the wrong headline on its own, because the fast part is the last pass. What we're actually working on is how to build agents that understand craft and can build craft into the work. The eighty two passes are the evidence, and they're only evidence because she counted them instead of remembering them.
I'll keep publishing it as long as I find it interesting. It's almost zero work for me. Right now the ratio is about what I'd expect from a team of thirty who started ten days ago. A few good days, a lot of small failures, and one or two things a week worth keeping.
It's at runwithfoxes.com/diary