O TYM ODCINKU
Chris has spent months trying to get his agents to talk to each other, and this episode is the honest tour of three attempts: what broke, what held, and what he actually runs now. He frames it against four trust levers borrowed from how a person climbs through the ranks - human IS the loop, human IN the loop, human ON the loop, human OUT of the loop - and pins the current shift to Gary Vaynerchuk's 15/80/5 model: own the first 15 percent of an initiative, get out of the way for the 80 in the middle, come back for the last 5.
Attempt one was AgentMail, a webhook service that bills itself as Gmail for agents. Silas, Chris's Hermes chief-of-staff agent, had his own inbox and would email Neo, the coder agent, to hand off work. It worked on vibes. Conversations died silently after about the third message, and worse, they died without telling Chris - the failure mode every manager recognizes. Sash draws the distinction that explains it: these are separate Hermes profiles, peers rather than sub-agents under one parent, so there is no hierarchy to carry the handshake. Attempt two, Hermes's Kanban feature, fixed exactly that. Kanban is really a wake-up mechanism with a native acknowledgement handshake: the orchestrator posts a task to another profile's board, that profile gets a heartbeat, picks it up, and links its subtask back. Chris runs it autonomously at 4 AM against a backlog board, with a Postgres ledger tracking the traffic. It still runs, and it still only works between Hermes profiles on one gateway.
The gap that Kanban could not close is that Claude Code is Chris's real building harness and it cannot clear its own context window. His SDLC runs the superpowers plugin - brainstorming on Sonnet, design on Opus, writing plans on Sonnet, then the build loop on Opus or Fable - and every handoff between those steps needed a human to clear context, relaunch, and switch models. That is the thing that killed autonomy. Grove Rooms are the answer: a dedicated tmux session, synced to the Postgres ledger, that Silas spins up and then drives. Silas watches for the spec file to be committed, types /exit, relaunches Claude Code in the same session on the right model, and kicks off the next skill, unattended. Chris answers the brainstorming questions, walks away, gets a notice when the room moves from plan to build, and comes back to review and run close. The next move he talks himself into on air is cross-harness: have Silas hand Claude Code's finished work to a Codex-backed agent for review before it ever reaches him, and eventually replace the whole arrangement with the native A2A protocol that Hermes, ElevenLabs, Copilot Studio, and Foundry Agents already speak.
Key takeaways:
- Separate agent profiles are peers, not sub-agents. If your orchestration depends on a parent-child hierarchy that does not exist, messages will die silently. Check whether your transport has a real acknowledgement handshake before you trust it with unattended work.
- A ledger is what makes stepping back survivable. Chris tracks every agent-to-agent transition in Postgres, so oversight is a lookup rather than an argument about what happened overnight.
- The bottleneck in autonomous building is usually context, not capability. Claude Code cannot clear its own context window, so any pipeline that spans multiple skills needs something outside the session to relaunch it.
- Run different models for different phases. Brainstorming on Sonnet, design on Opus, planning on Sonnet, build on Opus or Fable - and let the orchestrator do the switching so the phase boundary costs you nothing.
- Apply 15/80/5 to a build pipeline literally: answer the brainstorming interview, leave, and come back for review and close. If you cannot name your first 15 percent and your last 5, you are not delegating, you are just hoping.
Watch the video version on YouTube · Full show notes, transcript + takeaways
