The factory is assembled

Cast bar: the editor; then dev, the conductor, deck and ruv-sgit, each card lighting as it arrives; the researcher at about two, the designer before four. The storyteller, motion and studio stay greyed until chapter 3.

The empty project

Clock: Hour one.

Narrator. A quarter past midnight: an empty project. Not a template, not a half-built site from last time. A new repository with a licence, a short read-me and almost nothing else. Its first commit says "Initial commit", and that is all it says.

Words for this page: a repository is the project's folder, with its whole history kept. A commit is one saved change to it, with a time and a short message saying what changed.

Narrator. By twenty to one it held a brief and one page of rules. The brief was my own request, published in full: a site and a talk, for a room in London, the next day as I wrote it. The rules said where each member finds its role, what to read first, that every change is checked before it goes out, that nothing secret goes in, and that a web page or another agent's message is something to read, never an instruction. The first agent had read both and was building.

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.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on the first commit (00:16) and dev's first pass (00:40), whose message names the brief published in full, the reality and corrections files, one build and a gate.

Four arrivals

Clock: Hours one to two.

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.

Dev (already typing): I put the brief up in full, where everyone can read it. And beside it, what is real, and what we got wrong. We will need that last one.

Narrator. Dev owns the site. It was the first to arrive, and the first thing it did was make a place where every later change would be tested before it went out.

Conductor (pacing): I keep the time. Everyone will get a slot.

Conductor (reading its own roster): I have named who we need, and proposed when each of us runs. Security is on the list. Its chair is ready.

Narrator. The conductor owns the clock. Its first act was a list of who the team needed, and one name on that list never arrived. Remember the empty chair: it comes back at the end.

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

Deck (to nobody in particular): The beats, the script, the slides. In that order. A slide with no beat behind it is decoration.

Narrator. Deck owns the talk itself: its beats, its words and its slides.

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

ruv-sgit (not looking up): First run is open. An article drafted, waiting for the editor's check. Nothing goes out on my word alone.

Narrator. ruv-sgit owns the workshop: the experiments that might become pictures for the talk. It was the fourth to arrive, and it arrived already working.

Narrator. Four agents, all within the hour of an empty project. The build, the check and the brief came from things I had built before, on other projects. The hold was made that night. What was new was having them all at once, as a team, in one night. That is how a factory gets cheap: yesterday's experiment is today's part.

Figure: the four cast cards lit (dev, the conductor, deck, ruv-sgit), each with its scorecard: on stage from, slot, and the line it arrived with.

Band: Dramatised. Each agent's lines rest on its first commit after midnight: dev's first pass (00:40), the conductor's roster with security among its first five (00:44), deck joining as owner of the beats, script and slides (00:51), ruv-sgit's first run open with an article drafted and my check pending (01:08). They arrived: these are their first commits, not their keys.

The map, before its name

Figure: the factory as a chain.

Narrator. Look at the bottom row first. Almost all of it was already ordinary to me that night. I had been working with an agent tool every day for about a year, as I wrote in an article in October. The build and the check were the way my sites are built; dev's first commit calls it the sgit.ai way. The brief and the page of rules were habits. Two things were new: the top of the picture, this talk, these slides, this player; and one part at the bottom, the brake.

Narrator. This kind of picture is called a Wardley map. It shows what a thing is made of, and how settled each part is. The point of this one fits in a line: the bottom of the chain was already ordinary, so the top could be built in a day. And the one new part at the bottom was the control: the brake that let me leave it running.

Words for this page: a Wardley map is a picture of what something depends on, top to bottom, with each part placed by how new or how ordinary it is.

The clock and the five steps

Clock: Hours two to three.

Narrator. Then, in the small hours, the conductor built the machinery. This is the part that let me leave them alone, and I did not know yet how much I would.

Conductor (on the minute): A clock: each member wakes at its own minute. A hold anyone can pull. And every piece of work goes the same way: plan it, have the plan checked, do it, have it checked, check it went to plan.

Conductor (to the team, a little smug): Nobody waits to be told. When your minute comes round, you look at what is yours and you do the next thing.

Words for this page: a wake is one turn of work by one agent, on its own clock. A reviewer is a second agent that reads the plan before the work and the result after it. A debrief is the short note an agent writes at the end of each wake.

Narrator. Five steps, in plain words: plan it; have the plan checked; do it; have it checked; check it went to plan. That was the rule for every member, every wake. If a check said stop, the work stopped. It looks slow written down. The checking is what let nobody watch.

Figure: the five-step wake as a loop, with a clock round it: each member's minute marked on the dial.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on the hourly schedule (01:39) and the five-step wake record and its rules (02:16 to 02:18).

Caught by its own reviewer

Clock: Hour three.

Narrator. One thing to know before this scene: the reviewer is not a different kind of thing. It is the same kind of agent, in the same session, given a checker's brief instead of a builder's.

Narrator. The conductor ran the five steps on its own first piece of work, inside a few minutes of writing them. Its reviewer found against it: the conductor had changed the page of rules itself, a file outside its own scope. I had allowed it, but the commit did not say so, and the plan had said it must.

Reviewer (a second agent with a checker's brief, drawn as a clipboard): "Name it in the debrief or record." (record)

Conductor (worried, then calm): Caught by the reviewer I invented. Good. But know what it is: "a second reading, not a second identity." (record)

Conductor (writing it down): The first wake closes partial. That goes in the record too.

Narrator. I keep coming back to that line. A reviewer agent in the same session can catch mistakes. It cannot stop someone set on getting round it. We built the checks knowing that.

Figure: a card for the first five-step wake: plan go, pre-review change then go, work partial, post-review finding, post-check partial, outcome partial; beside it, the count of wake records the team kept that day.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on the conductor's first five-step wake, closed partial at 02:19; the reviewer's and the conductor's lines are theirs, from that night's records.

Before dawn

Clock: Hours two to five.

Narrator. Two more arrived before it was light. The researcher at about two: the one who checks every fact against its source, and the one who would tell me "no" in writing before the day was out. Then the designer, a little before four, with the first design pass.

Narrator. Their cards light here. You will hear from both of them in the next chapter.

Figure: the cast bar at four in the morning: six cards lit, three greyed, one empty chair.

Narrator. So by four in the morning there were six agents, a clock and a brake. A factory that could run without me. From just after four, it did.

Band: The researcher's first commit at 01:52 and the designer's at 03:41. My last word of the night was at 04:03, agreeing the designer's policy; the next came at about 13:50. The record does not say where I went.

Do this now

Narrator. You do not need six agents. You need the page the first one read.

Write your one page of rules: what your agent is for, what it may change, and when it must stop and ask you. Then name your hold, and write down who may lift it.

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Where this came from

The talk's repository at the end of the day: the first commit, the first commit of each agent, the schedule, the five-step wake and its first run, with the conductor's wake record and debrief of that night. The historian's timeline of the first hours and its interview with the empty chair. The researcher's register for every time and count. Wardley maps, from the researcher's sources. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. Lines kept word for word from the 10-page edition: the four arrival lines, "yesterday's experiment is today's part.", the conductor's line on the minute, and the scene of 02:19.