13 posts tagged #workflow.
Progressive disclosure keeps a skill library's index cost linear. The number of skill pairs an agent can confuse grows with the square of the library size - and nothing about a growing index tells you that's happening.
An agent reviewing its own plan misses the same defaults it always misses. Gate plan-mode exit on a different vendor's model, and a FAIL verdict re-engages planning before any code exists.
Your agent spends about 38 tokens working out where to make a change for every 1 token it spends making it. Then it pays that bill again on the next run. Here's the math, and the throwaway file that ends it.
Every ambiguous noun in a prompt forces the agent into a blind search over candidate files. A committed glossary turns that search into a lookup - and nets 4,410 tokens back on the very first prompt, no waiting required.
You don't author a skill from a blank page. You commission a subagent to research the reconciliation once - across a fifteen-service fleet, that one commission is worth 56,500 tokens saved.
Rounding decided across four files costs 5,500 tokens to trace, every time anyone asks. One deep module cuts that to 700 - and pays for itself by the fourth ask.
A requirements doc fixes the destination, a phased plan fixes the journey - and every technique on this blog for keeping a long build sharp only protects the journey. Here's what the destination costs when nobody checks it first.
A rule in your rules file only gets read if it survives to the top of a shrinking window. Move it into a hook that fires on the event instead, and expected compliance across one session's edits goes from 42.8% to 95.0%.
The blocker to running an agent overnight was never capability - it's trust. Layer a sandbox, an allowlist, and a scoped credential right, and one laptop's worst-case reach falls from 399 addressable things to 63, all recoverable with git checkout.
Your best agent workflow is six files that live on one machine. Rebuilt through Slack and memory, all six arrive intact 9.6% of the time. A plugin makes the whole loop one installable, versioned unit your team pulls.
An unattended loop that reads git log -5 each pass has a five-pass memory. In a 12-item plan, the decision made at pass 3 ages out at pass 9, two passes before pass 11 needs it. One line in PLAN.md pointing at the commit hash recovers it, for zero extra commits.
Auto-compact looks like memory because the session keeps running. Each pass is a lossy summary, and the loss compounds: two passes leave a Phase 1 decision a 25% chance of still being known. A plan-file relay holds 100% at any phase count.
Task selection is the one decision still routing every ticket through you. Write the priority order down once, and the 80 touches a sprint costs you collapse to 1 - same agent, same backlog.