The factory is assembled

On stage: the editor; then dev, the conductor, deck, ruv-sgit (each card appears as it arrives).

Narrator. A quarter past midnight: an empty project. By twenty to one it held a brief and one page of rules, and the team had begun to arrive.

How to read the scenes: they are dramatised. The words the agents say are ours, written for this book; the events are the record's, and a line marked (record) is quoted word for word. Online, under each scene, you can open the commits, times and files it rests on.

Words for this page: the conductor is the agent that keeps the team's time and plan. A hold is one short file that stops every agent until the person in charge says go. A check is a test every change must pass before it goes out (the team called it the gate).

Dev (happy, the fast one): First pass of the site and the talk. One build, and a check every change must pass.

Conductor (pacing): I keep the time. Everyone gets a slot, and anyone can pull the hold.

Deck (proud, the fussy one): The slides are mine. If a room cannot read one at a glance, it goes back.

ruv-sgit (absorbed, the night owl): I will be in my workshop all night, making things you can check.

Narrator. The build, the check and the brief came from things I had built before. The hold was made that night. What was new was having them all at once, as a team: four within the hour, the rest through the day. That is how a factory gets cheap: yesterday's experiment is today's part.

Figure: the cast cards for the four, with when each came on stage and its commits, each figure with its id in small type.

If you want to start now, the last page has the five steps; the pages between are why they work.

Working as a team of several? Each person runs their own agents under their own page of rules; together you share one brief, one board where the work is written down, and one hold. Write down who may lift the hold when its owner is away; until you have, nobody does.

Dramatised. Rests on each agent's first commit after midnight.