a workflow for coding agents
a loop you can
leave alone.
Two skills. /talk for design. /do for
shipping. End-to-end, every diff.
Set up this repo to use srid/agency by following the instructions at https://github.com/srid/agency/blob/master/docs/agency-setup.md
the loop
/talk · spec isn't obvious
Sketch first. Ship later.
Discuss, read, sketch. Run /hickey +
/lowy on the sketch. Read-only. Hand the converged
plan to /do.
/do · "done" is concrete
Research → review → ship.
Implement. Run /hickey + /lowy +
/code-police on the diff. CI, merge. Each fix lands
as its own commit.
/do has no design phase. Pasting a
thin plan into /do produces a thin implementation. The
fix is to do the design work in /talk first.
feedback
The agent needs a signal that its change actually worked. Unit tests and type-checks alone don't give it; what does depends on the surface.
frontend
Screenshot evidence on every PR — like kolu#791.
nix infra
NixOS VM tests. Closest thing to an executable spec the agent can drive.
backend / library
Fast, deterministic e2e. 30s deterministic beats 10min thorough.
structural review
After implementing, /do runs /hickey +
/lowy in parallel against the actual diff. Each
finding lands as its own commit; the full ledger ships as a PR
comment.
/hickey · the space lens
Is anything complected here?
After Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy. Flags two ideas braided into one construct — the kind of complecting that tests pass straight through.
/lowy · the time lens
What changes at a different rate?
After Juval Lowy's Righting Software. Flags modules coupled to neighbours that drift on a different schedule — volatility time-bombs that won't surface until later.
Full framing: Hickey/Lowy on kolu.dev.
project rules
Drop a .agency/<skill>.md file at the repo root and
the matching skill picks it up — plain Markdown, opt-in, no APM
ceremony. Adopt skills à la carte; layer your own rules on top of the
built-ins.
/code-police
Your quality gate, your rules.
.agency/code-police.md layers project-specific rules
on top of the built-in checklist — “never use
as any”, “always use TanStack Query for
fetches”, whatever your codebase needs. Enforced on every
/do diff.
/hickey, /lowy, /do
Same pattern, opt-in.
.agency/hickey.md + .agency/lowy.md
declare project-specific complecting patterns and axes of
volatility. .agency/do.md declares your
check / test / ci commands and
an opt-in ## PR evidence step.