What is system maintenance review?

System maintenance review is a concept in personal epistemology: Periodically review and rebalance your agent portfolio — retire underperformers, invest in high-value agents.

Example: A product manager runs six cognitive agents: a daily prioritization agent, a stakeholder communication agent, a risk assessment agent, a sprint retrospective agent, a competitive analysis agent, and a personal energy tracking agent. During a quarterly rebalance, she notices the competitive analysis agent hasn't been triggered in eight weeks — her market position stabilized and the agent's output stopped changing her decisions. Meanwhile, her risk assessment agent fires every day but only covers technical risks, missing regulatory exposure that nearly blindsided the team. She retires the competitive analysis agent, frees up the cognitive overhead it consumed, and reinvests that capacity into splitting the risk assessment agent into technical and regulatory variants. Same total number of agents. Radically different portfolio fitness.

This concept is part of Phase 30 (Agent Lifecycle) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent lifecycle.