His 4 multi-agent ownership rules got half rewritten by commenters in 3 days
Humaux · reddit · 2026-11-12
The author posted four ownership rules for multi-agent teams; within 3 days and 28 comments, the community broke two of them. Lesson: an unenforced rule is just a wish.
Rule 1's hole and fixes: "one writer per element, claimed by id" fails because an id is just a string and the board only checks the name. Two complementary fixes: the board mints ids and maintains its own list, loudly refusing unissued writes; each agent signs writes with its own key and the board verifies signatures.
Rule 3 hardened: a check that can never return false is decoration. Add a pre-write hook that refuses out-of-scope writes on every write, not just in tests.
The two that held, now sharper: missing data is "unverifiable," never "pass" — a missing field is not an empty result and an empty result is not success; a reviewer judges only its own card's diff and direct callers, non-goals go on the card in writing, and "done" is written once per task so both agents read the same version.
Key line: if your coordination depends on agents behaving, you have a polite request with commit access, not coordination.
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