Quintet Discipline

Engineering hygiene for multi-agent orchestration — keeping multi-worker jobs coordinated and verifying real output artifacts without unnecessary overhead.

1. Proportional Verification — Artifacts Over Self-Reports

In multi-agent work (especially with persistent tmux teams like quintet team or background fleet dispatches), the primary failure mode is blindly trusting a worker's self-reported success. A provider CLI may print "Done!", update taskboard.md to DONE, or return exit code 0 while having hallucinated changes or written empty files.

The core rule: Verify the actual artifacts on disk, not the worker's chat message.

Match verification to the change (Never force test suites blindly)

Verification must be proportional to the work done. Never run full test suites, smoke tests, or heavy harness checks for trivial edits, version bumps, metadata, or documentation.

Scope of Change	Appropriate Check	What NOT to do
Version bump / metadata / config	`git diff` to confirm target string changed	Do not run smoke tests or test suites
Documentation / notes	Inspect file rendered or check `git status`	Do not run test commands
Quintet worker team output	Check modified files exist, have non-zero bytes (`wc -c`), and `git diff` shows actual code	Do not trust self-reported `DONE` without inspecting disk
Fleet / debate synthesis	Confirm synthesis output file exists and has substance (not 0 bytes or error trace)	Do not assume an exit 0 returned valid content
Substantial logic / feature code	Targeted checks if relevant and fast; only run test suites if specifically part of the task or requested	Do not repeatedly run expensive multi-CLI smoke tests unprompted

2. Intent & Scope Separation — Preventing Worker Collision

When dispatching multiple workers (quintet team):

File-level isolation: Every worker must own distinct files or directories. Two workers writing to the same file will overwrite or clobber each other.
Clear deliverables: Define what files each worker is responsible for producing before spawning.
Inspect before shutdown: Check the files produced by workers before calling quintet team shutdown <name> — once the session is killed, pane histories and unsaved state are gone.

3. Pragmatic Plan Breakdown

When planning a multi-worker task:

Break the work down by distinct files or modular subtasks (~2–5 minutes of focused work per worker).
Avoid speculative ceremony: if a task is a single quick edit, just make the edit directly rather than spawning teams or creating heavy plans.
When work is complete, verify the resulting diff and deliver it cleanly.