Deliberate Currency
Look again when a tripwire fires. Don’t look when none has.
The Principle
Section titled “The Principle”- Currency with AI tooling is an engineering practice, not spare-time reading
- It has a named owner and a review cadence
- Re-evaluation is triggered by tripwires agreed in advance
- AI tooling decisions have a half-life of months
- Nothing announces obsolescence; falling behind looks like normal
- Scaffolding decays invisibly and may now make results worse
- Churn is the mirror failure: re-litigating every release resets compounding investment
- Tripwires fix both: we look when something meaningful changes, and only then
Owner and Cadence
Section titled “Owner and Cadence”- Inventory: every prompt, skill, and workaround, tagged with the model it was tuned against
- Owner: a named person accountable for flagging invalidated skills
- Sweep: on each major model release, ask whether each item still earns its keep
- Kill test: does the skill still beat a plain prompt? Deletion is a win
Tripwires
Section titled “Tripwires”- External:
- Frontier model release in a class we use daily
- Pricing change beyond an agreed percentage
- A pattern or protocol reaching real adoption among peers
- Internal:
- Agent retry rate climbing
- Humans redoing agent output more often
- Token spend per shipped change trending up
- Each tripwire has two levels: “log it” and “re-evaluate now”
- Time-box each re-evaluation so thresholds reflect its cost
Signal of Violation
Section titled “Signal of Violation”- Drift: skills tuned against a retired model still load, and nobody can say who owns them
- Churn: tooling choices reopen on every release though no tripwire fired
- Tripwires with no baseline: nobody can state retry rate or spend per shipped change, so nothing ever fires
- An inventory that only grows: no sweep has deleted a skill
Implemented By
Section titled “Implemented By”- Discovery Propagation: feed findings back
- Prompt Regression Testing: prove a change is safe
- Evaluation & Benchmarking: baselines that tripwires compare against
Open Questions
Section titled “Open Questions”- Can we state today’s cost per shipped change and first-pass success rate?
- Owner by volunteer or rotation?
Proposals: Discussion #3, Discussion #4