Agents City

The problem

I run a team where everybody works with agents. They are fast. In a good week each person's agents open more pull requests than the whole team used to open in a month.

And then this happens, every week:

• Somebody's agent renames an event, or moves a URL, or changes what a shared component does. It lands. Three days later the person who owns the analytics — or the SEO, or the cost of that nightly job — finds out. By then the only thing left to ask for is a rewrite.
• Somebody needs to know how a property behaves across fifteen repos. Nobody has fifteen repos in their head, and most people do not even have them cloned. So they read what they can find and guess the rest.
• The person who does know is in another role. The dev knows why that query is shaped like that; the devops knows why it runs at three in the morning. Neither of them is going to read the other's repo, and neither should have to.
• And nobody asks. Not because people are unhelpful — because asking is expensive. You interrupt somebody, they are in something else, you get an answer in an hour or tomorrow. So you guess, and the guess is what ships.
• There is a whole side of the room that gets asked least of all: product design and product owners. An agent builds the screen in twenty minutes. Whether it should look like that, whether it belongs there at all, whether it quietly breaks a flow somebody spent a quarter shaping — that is a judgement, and today it is made by whoever happened to be typing. Not out of disrespect: consulting a designer costs a meeting, and the agent is finished before the meeting exists. So the fastest part of the process ends up deciding the part that should have been decided slowest.
• Half the people are not on my Claude account: contractors, another company, t