Arula / Learning design / Lab 2
Standard intuition. Standardized language. Established behavior change.
The master map
01 / The master map
“I don’t know what’s true here yet, and neither does the agent.” Authority is something you establish before you act — not something you discover from the output.
Before opening an agent, write down what is authoritative, what is in scope, and what is explicitly out.
One agent holding two repos will sound confident and be shallow. Disagreement between two scoped reports is the signal, not the noise.
Never hand one agent two repositories. Run scoped sub-agents, reconcile the returns yourself, and record disagreements rather than silently resolving them.
Absence is invisible. Code shows you what exists; only the written requirements show you what’s missing.
Read the requirements against the code hunting for absence. Escalate an unresolved ambiguity instead of letting the agent fill the gap.
More agents is not orchestration. Orchestration is deciding who knows what. And a change can be correct in its final state and still unsafe while it’s rolling out.
Decide and write down the release order before any code is written.
A helpful agent is a dangerous agent. Proximity is not permission.
Review every diff for scope before you review it for correctness. If it touches something you didn’t authorize, revert — don’t rationalize.
Both halves can be right and the whole still wrong. The builder cannot be the judge.
Run a zero-context reviewer against the pair on every cross-repo change. Demand evidence, not assertion.
The next person — or the next agent — either inherits your context or re-derives it badly.
Write the handoff before closing the change: decisions made, evidence produced, what’s still open.
02 / Across all seven stages
The Determinism Ladder — prompt → rule → gate runs underneath all seven rather than belonging to one.
Its intuitionEvery time you move a decision out of “I asked the agent nicely” and into “the system won’t allow it,” you’ve made a permanent improvement instead of a hopeful one.