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Agency or consultancy

Many clients, many repositories, and context that must transfer between people in hours rather than weeks.

Agency or consultancy

Who this is

A team that works inside other people's repositories, several at a time, and hands work between colleagues who were not in last week's call. Their margin is a direct function of how fast somebody becomes useful in an unfamiliar codebase.

How they work

Rotation. A senior architect establishes how a client's repository works, then that knowledge has to reach whoever is on the project this sprint — and whichever assistant they point at it. When the engagement ends, the client inherits whatever was written down, which is usually a handover document written in a hurry.

What goes wrong

The same client convention explained to five different sessions in one week. Knowledge that exists only in the architect's chat history, so it leaves when they move to the next account. A finished engagement whose real state — what was decided, what was deliberately left undone — is unreconstructable from what was delivered.

16 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. re-explained the same context to a brand-new sessionRepository knowledge that only ever existed in a conversation has to be re-transmitted by hand to every worker that follows. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  2. found a task "in progress" that nobody had touched for three weeksA status that was authored rather than computed is true at the moment of writing and decays silently from then on. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. found the rule for that directory in a README no session ever loadedA local rule is either in the always-loaded file, where every session pays for it, or beside the code, where nothing relates it to the path being edited. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  4. spent an hour discovering something the repository already knew, twiceA worker learns something expensive about the codebase, uses it once, and it dies with the session because nothing turned it into a durable record. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. found five worktrees and could not say which of them still matteredIsolation is cheap to create and expensive to reason about: nothing records what a worktree was for or whether its work landed. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  6. had two sessions writing into one checkout without either knowingTwo workers in one working tree see each other only as unexplained file changes, and each treats the other as noise. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →
  7. went looking for why we chose this and found a chat logA decision that was reached in a session is stored where only that session can read it, so it is neither reviewable nor discoverable. cost: highconstant Why, and what to do →
  8. found a substantial change that no issue, ticket or plan ever asked forWork arrives with no bounded contract behind it, so its scope, its acceptance criteria and its ownership are all decided after the fact. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  9. was asked how far the milestone had got and had to go and ask four peopleProgress is an aggregate that exists only in people, because the parts it aggregates were never recorded in a form anything can add up. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  10. pasted a command from the documentation and watched it failExamples are written once, in prose, and nothing ever executes them again. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  11. could not say why one provider was used for that work and another for thisProvider and model selection is made implicitly, per session, and recorded nowhere, so it cannot be reviewed or repeated. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  12. looked at the bill and could not say which of it produced anythingConsumption is measured per account and outcomes are recorded per person, so the two can never be joined. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  13. found the same thing explained three times, slightly differentlyEvery hand-maintained copy of a fact drifts on its own schedule, and a reader cannot tell which copy is the current one. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  14. spent the first hour in an unfamiliar repository working out what was normal hereWhat is conventional in a codebase is knowledge held by its regulars, so every arrival — human or machine — pays for it again. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  15. reviewed a well-written contribution that broke a convention it had no way to discoverAssistants let anybody produce plausible contributions at volume; the conventions that make one correct are still only in the maintainers. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  16. was asked who made a change and under what policy, and had only a commitAttribution stops at the commit, so what authorised a change, what verified it and what governed it are unrecoverable. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →