advice candidate goes to: this-edition V villager
'Nobody knows how it is built' is fixable: make the agents leave a record, a mandate, a memory and a graph
HBR's warning that the AI designs the architecture so nobody in-house knows how the tool is built is true of most agent-built software today and does not have to be. If the agents work under a written mandate, keep their memory in a versioned store the company owns, and describe what they built as a graph, the architecture is a record the next team can read, not a mystery. A prototype ready for the villagers looks like Mondweep Chakravorty's SGit and Ruflo run: versions pinned, sixteen tests, a folder of evidence, a written behaviour policy, and a README that says plainly what it does not do yet.
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 article says the record is a proposal, not a standard: this site runs it; few organisations do yet. Dinis declares a stake: his companies sell open source and this kind of record.
Where it comes from
- Who will fix your mess? An answer to HBR's "deployment gap" from what this site has already published 'Nobody knows how it is built' can be fixed (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Legacy Applications answered outline, Concepts
- Future Self answered outline, Your CV
Where it goes
Chapter Explorer coding, not vibe coding, and the handover, part The frame (drafting); topic How to work with agents: briefs, voice, one shared state.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Explorer coding: what people call vibe coding, done as exploring, The deployment gap is a handover, and the prototype is the best brief, Design, the design canon and Christopher Alexander: the villager's and town planner's craft, Gen ZX are developers: coding with agents the explorer coding way, which is what vibe coding should be called, A villager move: no new features while you move, or nobody can tell which change broke what, The bonus test: if nobody will put their name or their bonus on it in production, it is not ready to be in line, An explorer-coded app is a brief, not a product: not ready to be in line, and the further towards commodity the fewer agents in line, Every product needs an explorer version, with paid conversions to a villager product and a town planner one.
Node idea:the-agents-leave-a-record in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.