Appendix F: The Steady-State Page
One scheduled hour a week; one page; dated. Companion to Chapter 11.
The defensive read watches whether the agent is safe. This page asks the other question: what is the agent learning about your product that you are not hearing. One page total. The discipline is the sentence; a signal you cannot compress into a sentence is one you have browsed rather than read.
Week of: ______ Agent: ______ Read by: ______
Commit first (write before opening any console)
Three sentences on what you expect this week’s usage to show: which category at the top of the escalation queue, roughly what override rate and where, what you think changed since last week.
- _____
- _____
- _____
The gap between these sentences and the actual week is a reading on how well you understand your own product in production.
The five signals (one sentence each, in order)
| Signal | The read | One sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Escalation clustering | What does the agent keep handing back? | |
| Override disagreement | Where do humans say no to it, and yes to what it escalated? | |
| Untouched boundary | What authority does it hold and never use? | |
| Workaround trace | What are users learning to say, and what does the distortion point at? | |
| Trust topology | Which outputs have humans stopped checking, and which do they still redo by hand? |
The single output
One recommendation, stated as a release decision, or the explicit sentence “no move this week.”
_____
Options: a boundary to shift, with the labeled cases that justify it; a behavior to specify for an authority that never fires; a remedy to spec from a workaround cluster; a supervisory surface to build where trust has stalled.
Dated: ______
The quarterly read
A quarter of these pages, read in sequence, is something close to a history of your product written from what it did rather than from what the team intended.