What does it mean that document your agents?

Written agent descriptions can be reviewed refined and shared.

Example: You have a morning routine agent: when the alarm goes off, you make coffee, check your calendar, and plan your top three priorities. This agent has run reliably for two years — but it lives entirely in your head. One stressful week, you skip the planning step. Then you skip it again. Within a month, the agent has silently degraded and you don't notice until you're regularly arriving at work reactive instead of prepared. Had you written it down — trigger, conditions, actions — the degradation would be visible in the gap between the document and your behavior.

Try this: Pick one agent you already run — a decision rule, a recurring process, a behavioral protocol. Write it down in this format: (1) Name, (2) Trigger — what activates it, (3) Conditions — when it applies and when it doesn't, (4) Actions — the specific steps, in order, (5) Success criteria — how you know it worked. Time yourself. If it takes more than ten minutes, the agent is probably too broad (see L-0410). If you can't articulate the trigger or conditions, you've discovered the agent was vaguer than you thought.