Agents

I once watched a triage bot look alive on a pull request while saying nothing useful. It left a comment. It set a label. The checks looked calm enough that nobody panicked. Under the hood, every shaped answer the classifier had already produced — the kind with a real type, a score, a choice — had been thrown away by a confidence floor, so the public surface collapsed to unknown. The bot was busy. The triage was empty. That is a worse failure than a loud red check, because executives read “the bot reviewed it” and implementers inherit folklore. ...

I used to want one agent that could do everything. Write the PR, tidy the calendar, answer Slack, review the diff, remind me about lacrosse pickup — one conversational surface, one “brain,” one place to yell when something was wrong. It felt efficient until the failures started rhyming. Coding work leaned on personal-assistant shortcuts. Calendar noise interrupted engineering focus. A gateway that looked like a helpful front door became a noisy hallway where every request sounded the same, and “the agent is up” — meaning the process is running, the light is on — stopped meaning either job was actually done. ...