Member-only story
Your Agent Has a User and Nobody Designed For Them
You reverted the prompt on Sunday evening. Nobody wrote the second email.
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Years back I was chief solution architect on a national welfare benefits platform. Around a hundred and fifty people building it, north of thirty thousand concurrent users, and billions of euros of payments moving through it. The law it encoded changed twice a year on a schedule set by legislation rather than by us, which is the one kind of deadline you genuinely cannot negotiate with.
Non-functional requirements were the actual product on that job. If the thing was slow, somebody waited longer for money they needed this week. We spent a lot of time on that and I’d defend most of the choices we made.
What I didn’t appreciate at the time is everything we got for free. When the system decided against someone, that person had somewhere to go. There was an objection procedure with a deadline, a form, a named office and a legal obligation to answer. We designed none of it. It had been written decades before any of us showed up, and we inherited it the way you inherit a foundation — which is to say without ever once thinking about it.
Every system I’ve built since has been standing on somebody else’s recourse path…
