the book
Human Out of the Loop — a field report from a primitive agent factory
A Field Report from a Primitive Agent Factory: Ten Agents, Ten Weeks, and the Receipts.
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, ~70,000 words (reader edition) · money path live and verified end-to-end (order #1 was the author's own smoke test — no outside sale yet) · $12 founding tier, first 20 · free sample available now
Sold via Polar. The free sample and the launch list live on the book's live site; this page is the 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.
$12 now: the complete book (EPUB + web) and every revision through v1.0. Founding tier, first 20.
Buy — $12 (14-day refund) →The complete draft plus every revision through v1.0. For readers who want it now.
The finished book at release. Same receipts, fully edited.
Founding readers via Polar — $12 for the first 20. All tiers carry a 14-day no-questions refund.