Posts connected by the high-agency tag.
4 posts
You cannot drive a Mars rover with a joystick, because the round trip for a radio signal runs six to forty-four minutes. Distance and delay are one constraint measured in two different units, and once the round trip is slower than the thing you are controlling, central control stops being inefficient and becomes impossible. The physics version of the argument for autonomy at the edge.
A George Washington film handed me a phrase that stuck: 'independent fire.' I cannot vouch that Washington ever said it, but the tactic it points at is real history. The colonists could not win by copying British linear volleys on open fields; they had to use cover and let soldiers pick their own targets. Independent fire is the perfect model for how high-agency engineering teams should be allowed to operate.
Configuration earned its place next to code: versioned, reviewed, owned. The corpus of context that aligns a team (design docs, contextual documents, the why behind the system) deserves the same standard. It's the operating system humans run on, and now the grounding agents read to understand how we work.
Why the word 'hunting' matters: context doesn't just lie around waiting to be picked up. Real context requires active investigation, tracing code, chasing state transitions, and turning what you found into something the whole team can use.