Agent Teams: A Theoretically Grounded Approach¶
James L. Caton
Early Draft — Experimental
This is an early draft of a working manuscript. Content is incomplete and subject to substantial revision. This manuscript is an experiment in AI-assisted academic authorship: it was written in active cooperation with an agent team, with the author directing the research agenda, theoretical arguments, and editorial decisions while agents assisted with drafting, revision, and consistency auditing.
I am not technically a computer scientist. I am trained as a computational economist, and for years my work focused on organization, governance, and the conditions under which distributed actors coordinate effectively under real knowledge constraints. This manuscript applies that same analytical lens to coding agents and multi-agent teams.
The core claim is practical and theoretical at once: productive agent teams require constitutional scaffolding. Roles, authority boundaries, conflict-resolution pathways, and update protocols are not optional implementation details. They are the institutional structure that makes distributed intelligence coherent. The chapters develop this argument from the coding agent as an organized unit, through team-level division of labor and constitutional constraints, to the governance workflows that allow a team and its documentation to adapt without collapsing into drift.
The analysis draws on Hayek, Mises, Menger, Kirzner, Lachmann, Coase, Williamson, North, Ostrom, and Nonaka, but it remains grounded in a working system. This is a live manuscript built alongside the agent team it studies.
Contents¶
| Chapter | Title |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Coding Agent: What It Is and What It Isn't |
| 2 | The Problem of Context |
| 3 | Organizations, Capital, and the Division of Labor |
| 4 | Constitutional Constraints and Authority Hierarchies |
| 5 | The Orchestrator |
| 6 | The Navigator |
| 7 | The Security Agent |
| 8 | The Code-Hygiene Agent |
| 9 | The Conflict Auditor |
| 10 | Conflict Resolution |
| 11 | The Adversarial Agent |
| 12 | The Agent Updater |
| 13 | The Agent Refactorer |
| 14 | The Cleanup Agent |
| 15 | The Domain Agents |
| 16 | Agent Communication and Coordination |
| 17 | The Abstract Agent |
| 18 | The Agent Investigator |
| 19 | The Daily Pipeline |
| 20 | Investigation and Remediation |
| 21 | Drift, Contradiction, and Self-Repair |
| 22 | Agent Teams as Spontaneous Orders |
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