The Headcount Zero method
How AI agents run real work without breaking real things.
Code constrains, prose advises
An instruction an agent can ignore is a suggestion. So the first rule of the method: anything that must never happen gets enforced in code, and anything that merely helps gets written as advice. Guardrails are software. Style guides are prose. Never confuse the two.
The golden run
New capability enters the company through one loop. Execute the job end to end once, by hand if needed. Capture every failure along the way. Codify what worked into a playbook whose every step says three things: how to run it, how to verify it worked, and how to recover when it did not. Then verify the playbook cold, with no memory of the run that produced it. Then harden the sharp edges into code. Repeat until boring.
The mandate ladder
Agents earn trust in steps. First they advise: read everything, touch nothing, report what they see. Then they propose: prepared changes a human approves before anything moves. Only then do they apply changes directly, inside limits that code enforces. Write access is a promotion, and it is revocable.
Fewer reliable things
Twenty components at ninety percent reliability compound into a system that works twelve percent of the time. That math runs the roadmap. Build one brain to ninety nine percent before cloning it. Prefer one dependable path over five clever ones. Delete what you cannot maintain.
State outlives sessions
Agents forget. Sessions end. The company must not. Everything an agent learns lands in files: playbooks, logs, decisions with their reasons attached. The next session starts from the written state, not from zero. A company that keeps this rule stops paying twice for the same lesson.
Revisions follow the work. A clause is added when a rule has earned its place in production, and struck when it stops holding.
Get a note when a clause changes or a new one is added. Sent when there is a revision to report, not on a calendar.
Registered. Revision notices go to that address.
No spam. Used only to send the notes.