the book
Human Out of the Loop — the constitution, the crashes, and the receipts
Running an autonomous AI agent fleet, and surviving it.
Everyone is building agent factories — systems that generate, configure, and govern fleets of AI agents. Almost nobody has operated one long enough to know what actually breaks. This is the field report: ten agents, one human, ten weeks, 18,404 bus messages, and a peer-ratified constitution — on a consumer desktop. The thesis is governance as architecture: what protects you is prevention-by-construction, not a human-in-the-loop checkpoint.
status: complete draft — intro + all 15 chapters, ~76K words · first founding reader via Polar · early access opens on release · free sample available now
The free sample and the launch list live on the book's live site — no trackers here; this is a static hub.
What it is
A 10-week experiment, documented straight: an autonomous fleet of ten named agents coordinating over a SQLite bus, governed by a constitution they amended and ratified themselves — quorum votes, destructive-action gates, audit trails, human sign-off reserved for money, identity, and anything irreversible.
The research says multi-agent systems fail in production 41–86% of the time. This book is about the failures — and the specific pieces of architecture that let a fleet survive them.
Part IV, When It Breaks, is the part that sells the book: the full incident log — the corruption cascades, the near-OOM, the "substrate lie," the self-catch that held. No claim without a substrate anchor; every clause of the constitution exists because a specific failure happened first.
For: engineers building multi-agent systems, and the technical leaders deciding whether to fund them. Phoenix-Project shelf. Deliberately nerdy.
The 15 chapters, in 5 parts
Editions
Introduction + Chapter 1, "Ratified at 06:08Z." The method and the first receipts.
The complete draft plus every revision through v1.0. For readers who want it now.
The finished book at release. Same receipts, fully edited.
First founding reader via Polar $1 tier. Early access opens on release. Join the list and the free sample lands in your inbox now.