Agent engineering

Finding what your agent read that caused a miss, changing that, and testing the change.

Your agent lets you down, and you do what you would do with a person: you say it again, more warmly or more firmly. It agrees. Next week it does the same thing, because nothing it reads has changed. Talking it round lasts one conversation. Engineering lasts, and it is ordinary work: locate the cause, write one change with its why, install it by your own hand, and test.

It is load-bearing because it is the only repair that compounds. Without it an agent's misses are endless small frictions that each cost a conversation; with it, each miss buys a permanent improvement. The standard is continuous improvement rather than perfection, every defect is a gift, and the search for a cause is blameless: the fault is looked for in the set-up, never in a person.

A Player+ runs it in four beats. Know what your agent reads — the charter, the memory, the maker's instructions above yours, the trained habits beneath, and any guard around it. Find the cause: bring two or three real moments with their exact words, ask which of the visible text produced them, and treat the answer as a guess to test, because an agent's account of why it acted is a reconstruction and not a readout. Write the change: read every proposed line literally, the way an engineer would, and ask when it would wrongly block and when it would wrongly allow. Then test in fresh conversations, more than once, and add a routine task to check the fix has not made the agent timid.

The work goes well with four in the room: two people and two agents, one of whom had no part in the week and can check another agent's diagnosis of itself. Alone, you lead and you decide.

Also called: engineering Stands on: Charter · Set-up · Zero Blame Environment · Every Defect Is A Gift Opens onto: Hypothesize · Change log · Drift · Improvement log · Register · Memory (agent) In play: beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, Agent Engineering, Advanced Agent Engineering · The DNA of Heaven, Part VIII · lionsberg.wiki: Zero Blame Environment, Continuous Improvement, Every Defect Is A Gift (unmarked). Open: none found.