Some new agentic patterns — Massively Parallel Procrastination

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July 5, 2026

Some new agentic patterns

You can also read this post on Prime Radiant's blog.

Almost all of this post was written on June 1, before Anthropic shipped Claude Tag. Nothing I'm writing about uses (or is based on) Claude Tag

At Prime Radiant, we've got a bunch of agents in our Slack. I want to tell you a bit about how we've started shipping some changes to internal production with an "agentic user in the loop." Letting an agent work directly with the implementer building its runloop and tooling is getting us higher-quality tools and experiences for the agent without a human in the middle of a game of telephone.

But first, a bit of backstory on how we're using non-coding agents at Prime Radiant.

One of them, Scribble, is just there to listen for when someone reports a problem or provides a new bit of information. It opens tickets for the issues and updates an internal wiki with the information. (It also logs our daily standups and keeps us honest about whether we finished what we said we were going to do the previous day.)

Another, Nora, is our junior go-to-market "person." Nora is built on top of Nanoclaw and is still learning her craft, but is surprisingly helpful, partially because she considers herself a team member, not just an assistant. I've put a bunch of time into tuning her prompting and constitution. She gets a ton of value out of knowing that she journals obsessively. (I should note that I don't tend to gender my agents, but Nora picked a name and a gender and was very clear about that and...who am I to argue?)

I think the most surprising interaction I've had with Nora was the morning I woke up to a slack DM telling me that I needed to be speaking at more conferences. (I do.) She pointed out that the CFP for a particular AI conference had closed a week earlier, but that the program chair was known to take late submissions of interesting talks by DM. She'd taken the liberty of drafting a DM for me to send. I didn't actually send the DM, but I should have.

We have another agent, "Spec-together" that was a first prototype of what has become our new multi-player Brainstorm app.

And we have a small fleet of "Sen" personal assistant agents. They're *claw-esque, but date from before openclaw was a thing. Each one has been trained to be an executive assistant, using a set of skills built on some of the resources that excellent human EAs use to learn their craft. Sen triages my mail, puts together a daily brief, does research tasks (both for me and independently), interacts with Linear, etc.

They have the standard set of affordances - They can chat on Slack. They use tools. They've got a task scheduler that can wake them up and re-inject a prompt they set for themselves at a specific time or on a schedule they define. They can use and author skills. Mine has a dropbox folder it shares with me. When we moved Sen to the cloud, I lost one of my favorite dumb features - Sen used to be able to print things directly. Sen (v1) was built on top of the Claude Agents SDK.

For the past month or so, I've been doing initial bringup of a "new" iteration of Sen, intended to be more of a colleague than an assistant. This time around, I'm building it from the ground up on top of an agents SDK I control. Lace got its start in May 2025 as my take on a command line coding agent. Over the past year, it's mutated a few times, first growing a web interface, then flipping to an ACP-derived wire protocol so you can connect any client you want to it. It speaks a bunch of different flavors of model provider API, manages caching, subagents, tools, skills, and all the other stuff you might expect. It has supported subagents in isolated containers for the better part of a year. One of the latest things to land has been the ability to run subagents locally and to project all of their tools into a container, such that the agent believes it is running in that container.

The thing I've been working on over the past few weeks is the credentials story for the new Sen agent running on top of Lace. Right now, I'm building with a design that assumes the agent has its own credentials for any service that it accesses, not yours. (You wouldn't share your email account or GitHub credentials with a colleague, right?) As of now, nobody has solved Simon's Lethal Trifecta - If a single agent has access to private information, can communicate externally, and is exposed to untrusted content, there is no structural way to guarantee that that agent can't be suborned. So the name of the game is compartmentalization and risk reduction.

The architecture I've landed on for now:

The main agent does not have the ability to directly communicate externally.

The main agent is able to communicate with ephemeral subagents that do have the ability to communicate externally

No agent has intentional direct exposure to credentials (with one very real gap...