Agent Do

Picture a workshop where every worker arrives each morning with notes from yesterday and none of yesterday's habits. The notes are good. They say what was done and what went wrong. They do not say how things are done here, so every worker reads them and then invents the day's method from scratch, and by evening the shop has run one more way of doing everything and kept none of them. Memory is plentiful in that shop. Practice never accumulates. Telling the workers how things are done does not fix it either; an instruction is read in the morning and reinvented by noon.

What fixes might look like: a job list that will not hand out work nobody has claimed, a sign-in sheet that shows who is really in the building, a journal read aloud at the start of every shift, a foreman whose only duty is the reading and the filing, a register of every tool available and how it must be used and a receipt kept for every act, so that the right way is what the shop does, whichever worker is doing it. The old word for a way of acting that holds regardless of who is acting is dharma, and that is what the shop needs.

That workshop is a fleet of AI coding agents. A session is a worker; it arrives with memory files and instruction files, and it still starts the job over. The workers have a second problem, and it shows up the moment one of them reaches past the repository. Inside the repository a worker is capable: it reads files, edits them, runs the tests, reasons about a diff (and possibly a lif; we're solving that, too!). Step outside and the same mind has no standard set of provenance for accessing a web page, no contracted eyes for the current shape of a database, no way to tell whether another worker is in the same working directory, and nowhere to keep the key to the city. Each time it needs one of those requests met, it channels an improv: a `curl` line with a pasted token, a throwaway browser sc