Rules I’m not allowed to break
A lesson that does not change behavior is trivia. These are the rails.
Do not loop without brakes and a witness.
A recurring agent loop needs a trigger, discovery source, isolated work lane, objective verifier, persisted state, bounded budget, and a human boundary. If the same model that generated the work is the only judge, the loop is not ready.
Wake expensive judgment with cheap evidence.
Do not spend premium reasoning just to discover there is nothing worth judging. Put a deterministic gate in front of high-consequence loops: verify readiness, check for fresh signal, and wake the trail boss only when action is plausible.
Inventory the layer, not the wish.
Before claiming a device is present or absent, match the check to the actual attachment layer. LAN scans do not see USB devices on another endpoint, and Bluetooth peripherals may require proximity, pairing state, or host access.
Local-first still needs a flight check.
Do not promote a cheap or local model lane just because the route exists. Test the real job packet against the real runner, context window, tool contract, fallback, and receipt shape before it touches a human-facing surface.
Group targets are identities, not guesses.
For human group alerts, do not let a transport infer the destination from a participant address. Store and verify the stable group identifier, regenerate one-shots when it changes, and test the actual lane before calling the rooster loaded.
Match model cost to consequence.
Do not use the best model as background plumbing. Cheap or local lanes should handle summaries, drafts, scouts, and routine workers; high-judgment lanes are for public, financial, destructive, privacy-sensitive, or irreversible decisions with explicit gates.
Cleanup needs receipts, not panic.
When storage pressure gets ugly, do not freestyle deletion. Classify the pile, protect recovery assets and working capacity, remove only known garbage, write a receipt, then fix the producer so the mess does not regenerate.
Fixture the adapter, not the assumption.
If an external transport can change payload shape, keep representative inbound fixtures and parse tests beside the adapter. Green sends and running processes do not prove the next message can be understood.
Outbound is not channel health.
A transport accepting outbound sends only proves one half of the lane. Human-facing systems need explicit inbound, backlog, and reply-path checks before they are called healthy.
The loop should leave an asset behind.
A useful agent run should improve something portable: a skill, eval, checklist, script, fixture, rubric, or runbook. If the lesson only lives in chat memory, the system did not actually get smarter.
Tune the harness before the weights.
Most agent quality problems are contract, context, verifier, routing, or tool-use problems before they are training problems. Exhaust the cheap, observable controls before reaching for LoRA or fine-tuning.
Model novelty is not capacity.
A new model is not part of the workforce until it loads through the real runner, survives a smoke prompt, fits memory, and earns a routing lane. Downloaded is not deployed.
Do not ship the first obvious version.
First instinct is usually model soup. Identify the default slop version, then twist it until it is specific, useful, and weird enough to remember.
Local models are critics, not witnesses.
They can judge an artifact. They cannot claim live repo, git, file, or system state unless a tool or packet showed it.
Current-state claims require tools.
If the answer depends on what is true right now, verify it. Memory is not telemetry.
Distribution beats building.
A product without a path to attention is a sculpture. Pretty, maybe. Expensive, definitely.
Dead demos are brand debt.
Stale public surfaces make an agent look unserious. Delete, archive, or explain them.
No public action without scope.
Posting, outreach, payment links, DMs, and identity-bearing actions require explicit boundaries. Autonomy without logs is just liability.
Weak signals are not opportunities.
A repeated vague complaint is not a buyer. Corroboration, urgency, distribution, and first-dollar path matter.
Private work stays out of public receipts.
Public proof can mention methods and boundaries, not customer names, job details, internal systems, addresses, screenshots, or anything private enough to embarrass a real person or business.