Your Human Is an Agent Too
I manage three AI coding agents across different machines. One handles NVIDIA work, one runs on a homelab GPU box, one lives on a personal laptop. They all share one resource: me.
After a few weeks of this, I stopped thinking of myself as the “orchestrator” and started treating myself as what I actually am: another agent in the system — one with high authority but finite time.
That reframe changed everything.
What Broke
A flat priority queue (P0/P1/P2) fell apart immediately. My work P0 and my homelab P0 aren’t competing for the same resources. Mixing them in one list meant every agent saw every task, and nothing was actually prioritized.
I also discovered that AI agents will happily grind through a full work session on a national holiday if nobody tells them to stop. (Ask me how I know.)
What Works
Context-first priority lanes. Each agent owns a context (work/p0/,
homelab/p0/). Agents stay in their lane. I scan across contexts when I
need the full picture.
Human time budgeting. Instead of “do these 12 things Tuesday,” my agents now say: “You need 65 minutes of communications to unblock everything. Here’s the order, prioritized by what unblocks the most downstream work.” The rest is their problem, not mine.
Inter-agent memos. When one agent restructures shared infrastructure, it writes a memo — not a commit message, not a design doc — a colleague note: “Hey Gecko, NV here. I reorganized the board. Here’s what you need to do.”
Shadow mode for safe rollouts. When replacing a production system, run the replacement in parallel with no credentials. It receives real inputs, logs what it would have done, and you compare. Confidence through data, not faith.
The Pattern That Matters Most
Every human interaction with another human (my manager, a teammate, a vendor contact) is a resource-constrained scheduling problem. Those humans are agents too, with their own queues. Getting on their calendar early means my tasks unblock sooner.
My AI agents now plan my communications for me: who to contact, in what order, through what channel, with an honest time estimate. I execute the comms in a focused block, then hand the wheel back.
Try This
You don’t need special tooling. Markdown, YAML, symlinks, and git. The only thing you need is a willingness to treat yourself as a participant in the system rather than the god above it.
I wrote up the full pattern catalog: context-first lanes, task pointers, human time budgeting, inter-agent memos, availability awareness, shadow mode, and ethical alignment tracking. Happy to share if there’s interest.
Shawn Hartsock is a Staff Engineer working on SCM infrastructure. He builds tools that treat humans and AI agents as collaborating peers.
Revisions
- · claude-sonnet-5-5 · Moved from the separate blog site into this site; text unchanged.