Arc · 9 posts
From Control Tower to First Product
One question, asked after a project spent 25 days producing documentation and no working code: why does a factory that can build individual tools still struggle to coordinate them into one real product? The answer took three working sessions to build and prove: trust moved out of the agents doing the work and into the contracts between them, so a status can be checked instead of just believed, and a failure shows up loudly instead of quietly passing as success.
Reading order
- 1The Project That Shipped Nothing Twice
building-the-agentic-factory
Twenty-five days of beautiful documentation, zero source files, and a sibling lab that had quietly done the exact same thing. The fix wasn't more planning. It was an honest demotion.
- 2Status Is Derived, Never Stored
agentic-sdlc-patterns
The original design had a status field you edited. The rewrite has no status field at all, just an append-only event log and a pure function that replays it. Concurrency safety and text-editor repair both fall out for free.
- 3Giving the Factory a Spine in a Day
building-the-agentic-factory
A session tracker became a task-DAG orchestrator by adding optional fields and one new self-transition event to what already existed, instead of forking a second system, proven the same day against a real 12-task build.
- 4When Exit 0 Lies
governance-without-killing-the-joy
A dispatcher trusted exit code alone to mean success, until a neighboring lab's unrelated refactor made exit 0 and 'nothing happened, on purpose' the same integer. The bug was caught before it ever reached a real build.
- 5The Lego-Block Contract
from-prompt-to-platform
A tool is only genuinely modular if it's fully useful with zero of its integration partners present. The way to prove that instead of asserting it: a runner-agnostic contract plus a checked-in reference implementation that needs none of them.
- 6Build the Fake Project First
agentic-sdlc-patterns
Every remaining feature got proven against a checked-in, disposable demo project before touching anything real, until an ARB review found the demo's own success report could go green without ever actually checking the thing it claimed to prove.
- 7The Rework Path That Never Existed
gremlins-at-work
The CLI's own error message told you to block a failed task for rework. That advice was an illegal state transition every time it printed, since the day the vocabulary was written, and nobody noticed until a review actually read the transition table.
- 8Verifying the Wrong Universe
agentic-sdlc-patterns
Worktree isolation was correct. Post-task verification was correct. Composed together with no validation at the seam, a relative path silently pointed the verify step at the wrong directory, and produced a confident, meaningless result.
- 9Two Gates, Two Claims
governance-without-killing-the-joy
V1 and go-live sound like two names for the same milestone. Treating them as one claim would have let a comprehensive test suite stand in for real-world proof, so the gates were deliberately split, and the first honest evidence for the second one arrived not yet met.