Resources / agentic system design

The tools, not the talk.

Working material from the practice, free to use and free to pass on. Each one exists for a decision somebody actually has to make, and each one is specific enough to be wrong — which is the only kind worth publishing.

1 resource · last updated 13 September 2026

00 How to use these

Built to be used in a room, not read alone.

Every resource here scores or decides something. That means it is most useful with the two or three people who disagree about the answer, and least useful as a download you skim. Where a resource asks several people to score the same thing, have everyone commit privately before anyone speaks. The disagreements are the finding.

Nothing here needs an account, a licence or an email address. Take them into your own documents, change the thresholds to suit your risk, and keep them.

01 Agentic system design

One tool, so far.

01 Scored checklist

The POC Screen

Twelve questions that decide whether an agentic proof of concept can reach production — asked before you build it.

Most agentic proofs of concept are judged after the demo goes well, which is the one moment nobody is able to judge them. This screen moves the decision earlier. Twelve questions across four sections, and each question defines what earns a 0, a 1 and a 2, so two people scoring the same proof of concept land in the same place instead of trading opinions. The maximum is 24. One section is a hard gate: any zero on blast radius stops the exercise whatever the total says, because a high score elsewhere does not buy back an action you cannot undo. Three cut-lines read the result — pilot candidate, narrow it and score again, or a demo rather than a pilot. It closes with four ways to answer most of the questions before the agent exists, in ascending order of cost, each one cheaper than a pilot that fails in front of a customer.

What you can do with it

Score a proposed agent against twelve criteria, and defend the number to someone who disagrees
Find the rows where two people scored two points apart, which is where the team does not share a picture of the system
Decide whether to narrow the scope of a proof of concept or stop it
Answer most of the screen without building anything, using an evaluation set, a human behind the curtain, deliberate tool failures, or a shadow run

Open The POC Screen → Interactive. Scores in the page and nothing is stored or sent — a worked example to load, a copyable scorecard, and a print view.

Published 13 September 2026

→ Where these come from

These are offcuts from the teaching.

Each of these started as something a room needed. They are published because a checklist nobody outside the room can read is a checklist that only ever gets used eight times a year. The cohort is where they get argued about with someone who has carried the outcome, which is the part a template cannot do on its own.

See the cohort → Field notes →