Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 4568 answers
Your full set of active agents is a portfolio that should be balanced and diversified.
Periodically review and rebalance your agent portfolio — retire underperformers, invest in high-value agents.
Periodically review and rebalance your agent portfolio — retire underperformers, invest in high-value agents.
Periodically review and rebalance your agent portfolio — retire underperformers, invest in high-value agents.
List every active cognitive agent you maintain — every recurring process, checklist, decision framework, or structured routine you run regularly. For each one, score two things on a 1-to-5 scale: (1) how often it actually fires in a typical week, and (2) how much its output changes your behavior.
Treating all agents as equally important and never retiring any of them. This is portfolio drift — the cognitive equivalent of letting your investment allocations wander unchecked. You'll know you're in this failure mode when you feel vaguely overwhelmed by your own systems but can't name which.
Periodically review and rebalance your agent portfolio — retire underperformers, invest in high-value agents.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
Identify one of your most reliable existing agents — a habit, routine, or behavioral pattern that fires consistently and produces good results. Write down its core components: (1) the trigger that activates it, (2) the environment it operates in, (3) the sequence of steps it follows, (4) the.
Inheriting too much. The most common failure in agent inheritance is treating the parent agent as a fixed template and copying it entirely rather than selectively extracting the components that are actually relevant. A person who has a reliable morning exercise agent tries to build a morning.
New agents can inherit properties and patterns from existing successful agents rather than being built from scratch.
Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.
Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.
Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.
Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.
Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.
Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.
Review the cognitive agents you have built or are building. Identify two or three that share a similar structure — similar trigger types, similar response patterns, similar monitoring needs. Now extract the common structure into a template. Write it out explicitly: what are the slots that need to.