method candidate goes to: this-edition T town planner
A budget per step, declared before anything runs, is the objective way to say good enough; the five whys move it
Agents keep going, that is what they do, and one agent handing work to another looks efficient while it spends. The way to stay on the right side of diminishing returns is a budget per altitude and per change, decided in advance, so a workflow's maximum cost is knowable before it runs rather than discovered afterwards; work handed from agent to agent carries its budget and never widens it. Being able to tell a team the budget is spent was one of the most useful controls Dinis ever had, because teams are very good at keeping going. Then the five whys: every finding at one layer is a question about the layer below, and the fix goes there as a rule, so the next change like it is caught for the price of a query. Onboard by starting at one point and continuing, never by analysing everything.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. The junior's version of knowing-when-to-stop, as a mechanism rather than an experience. Every agent doing the work runs under a behaviour policy written before its first run.
Where it comes from
- If somebody built a company on code review From art to science; Constraints keep it in control, the five whys make it cheaper (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Deadlines answered outline, Concepts
- One way and two way doors answered outline, Life Patterns
Where it goes
Chapter Direction is the scarce skill, part Direction and judgement (drafting); topic How to work with agents: briefs, voice, one shared state.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Direction is the scarce skill: the place of highest leverage, Knowing when to stop is most of seniority, One-way and two-way doors, blast radius, and where a person belongs, Agents decide, people answer.
Node idea:a-budget-per-step-is-the-objective-good-enough in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.