What does it mean that agent ecosystem health?

Your set of agents is an ecosystem — it needs balance and periodic assessment.

Example: You run five cognitive agents: a morning planning agent, a focus-protection agent, a reading-capture agent, an exercise-commitment agent, and a reflection agent. Individually, each one passed its own test when you built it. But you have never assessed them together. The planning agent schedules deep work blocks, but the exercise agent interrupts them. The reading agent captures material faster than the reflection agent can process it, creating a backlog that quietly rots. The focus-protection agent rejects meetings that the planning agent already accepted, producing calendar conflicts you resolve ad hoc every week. No single agent is broken. The ecosystem is sick. Compare this to someone who runs a monthly ecosystem review: they check whether agents are producing conflicting outputs, whether any agent's throughput exceeds downstream capacity, and whether the total coordination overhead is growing or shrinking. Same five agents. One person has a collection. The other has a functioning ecology.

Try this: List every active cognitive agent you currently operate — every recurring commitment, routine, rule, habit, or automated behavior that runs with some regularity. For each one, rate three dimensions on a 1-to-5 scale: vigor (is it producing meaningful output?), organization (does it connect cleanly to other agents?), and resilience (does it recover when disrupted?). Multiply the three scores for each agent. Any agent scoring below 27 needs attention. Any agent scoring below 8 needs triage or removal. Now look at the list as a whole: where are two agents producing conflicting outputs? Where is one agent's output overwhelming another's input capacity? You have just performed your first ecosystem health assessment.