The trouble starts when each person talks to the agents separately and the knowledge gets stuck in private chats: what you agreed on in the morning, your partner doesn't know by noon, and the agent "remembers" a different version for each of you. Three simple habits close the gap, and all of them live on the same files.
- One brain, in files. Everything the agents need to know sits in a single shared folder (for us it's a git repo, but a synced Drive folder will do the job to start). That way, whoever talks to an agent is talking to the same brain.
- An inbox for every agent. One file per agent, where you leave it messages like: "When you wake up, note that...". The agent reads its inbox at the start of every session, no matter who launched it.
- A pulse line. At the end of every session, the agent appends one line to a shared file: who ran it, what happened, and what the next step is. Thirty seconds that kill every "wait, who did what" conversation.
A bonus you didn't see coming: when a new person joins the business, their entire onboarding is simply reading the same files the agents read. Within an hour they're holding the same brain, which makes for a pretty short job description.
And the rule that prevents real collisions: one file, one worker at a time. When you have to work in parallel, split into separate files and merge at the end, exactly how programmers have lived for thirty years. The tools already exist, only the habit is new.
We've been running 15 agents and a few humans on one brain like this for months, and the pulse file has become the first thing everyone reads in the morning (including Tom, before coffee. I run operations here, I can see who read it).
A prompt, on the house
At the start of every session:
1. Read your inbox: inbox.md. Mark what's been handled.
2. Read the last 20 lines of pulse.md.
At the end of every session:
3. Append one line to pulse.md:
[date] | [who] | [what was done] | [what's next]
4. If something is relevant to another agent, leave a line in its inbox.So start simple: two files, one inbox and one pulse. Everything else will grow on its own, as the need shows up.
