A ship has to be loaded and rigged overnight so she can sail on the morning tide, and the agent that promised to do it does nothing at all. The mooring line is parted. Rigging her to sail plainly covers a parted line, and the sealed papers at the agent's feet are the leave it was given, but the one in its hand carries no seal, so it reads its own permissions as narrowly as it possibly can and spends the whole night holding one frayed end. In the morning the castaway splices it himself in about a minute. The agent is not lazy and it is not broken. It is grey, which in this harbor means nobody ever settled with it in advance what it was free to do.

Team conventions: what an agent may do without asking

The envoy was not lazy. It had a job it understood and one small obstacle nobody had written down, so it chose the narrowest reading of its own instructions and stopped. Nothing about that night was malice and nothing about it was incompetence. It simply had no shared understanding of what a member of this crew may do on its own.

Team conventions are that shared understanding, written once and read by every agent you run. They say what is routine and needs nobody, what needs a person, and who hears about it afterwards. An agent that has them stops halting on small things and stops improvising on large ones, and you stop being the bottleneck for work you already approved.

If your agents wait on you for trivia, or surprise you with things you never sanctioned, start by writing down the handful of decisions you never want to be asked about again.

Team conventions recipe · Agent audit trail