Steve Yegge comic roasts agent ops: five-hour wedge, every alarm fired, nobody woke
Steve_Yegge · x · 2026-08-25
Steve Yegge's comic strip The Wheelhouse #4, "Fire Alarms," lampoons an agent-ops paradox: every agent is wired with patrol scripts, watchers, and escalation messages, and the wiring fires on schedule — but no human actually gets woken.
Each strip ships with "receipts": real, redacted conversation records. The headline case is a five-hour wedge on 2026-08-08 — the queue jammed overnight while the human slept, every mechanism fired, and the postmortem's one-line finding entered the shop's standing rules: "every mechanism fired, 'nothing with hands got woken'." The resulting rule, now booted into every agent: "A page nobody reads discharges nothing." The same shape recurred three days later: 10+ unread alarms piled up while one seat was deep in another task and another had been dead for days — the notifier working perfectly, the office out of hands.
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