you don't design an agentic system. you distill it from real production. designers who work upfront produce the wrong categories because they don't know yet what production will reveal.
this isn't content-specific.
CLAUDE.md files across 7 engineering projects i've documented all emerged the same way: distilled from caught failures. a bug that recurred 3 times. a deployment convention that stabilized.
different domain, same discipline.
teams that design agentic systems upfront produce wrong categories.
someone builds a skill file with 15 sections before using the system. production makes corrections that don't fit. the file bloats, categories overlap, and it becomes an inheritance everyone works around.
the commit that encodes an agentic system's structure is cheap.
the judgment to recognize when a layer is ripe is expensive.
and it compounds only for someone doing real production work. not for someone thinking about the shape of the system in the abstract.
designers who work upfront produce the wrong categories. they don't know yet what production will reveal.
"ai-sounding patterns" is a useful category only because 16 of them got produced in real writing. the abstraction came from the output. it did not precede the output.
