Resources
Templates
Four artefacts for the week you have to run a design review, write down a decision, or ask your employer to fund a place. Each one is a blank you can take into the next meeting, with a completed example beside it so you are not guessing what belongs under a heading.
Copy them, download them, print them. There is nothing to sign up for and no address to leave.
Agent design canvas
One page and six boxes — the six decisions an agentic design is made of, in the order they are worth making, with a worked example beside the blank.
Reach for it when You are about to build something that acts, or somebody has handed you a design and asked whether it is sound.
Open the template Ten items with suggested timings, adding up to an hour.Design review agenda
A sixty-minute agenda for reviewing a system that acts — one decision, one traced action, four questions, and owners against every outcome.
Reach for it when You have been asked to run a review of an agentic design, and you would rather spend the hour on the trade-offs than on excavating what was built.
Open the template Seven headings, fixed, in this order.Architecture decision record
Seven headings for writing down a design decision in the shape you would put in front of an architecture review — with one filled in, on the decision to let a system move money.
Reach for it when A decision has been made and somebody will have to understand it later — during an incident, at a handover, or when the person who made it has moved on.
Open the template One page, seven short sections, written to be read in three minutes.Employer funding summary
A one-page case to send your manager — what you are asking for, the decision it is about, what changes in your work, and how they would know whether it worked.
Reach for it when You want your employer to fund or approve a place, and you would rather send a case than open a negotiation.
Open the templateWhy each one comes in two halves
A blank template on its own is a stationery cupboard. The headings are the easy part; knowing what belongs underneath them is the work, and a form cannot teach it. A worked example on its own has the opposite problem — it is admirable and you cannot take it into your own review.
So each page here carries both, generated from one list of sections in one order, and they cannot drift apart into two documents organised differently. Every completed example is illustrative — it continues the same returns assistant used across this site, and where a real record would carry a measurement it carries angle brackets showing you where yours goes, rather than a plausible-looking number nobody measured.
If you would rather be asked the questions
Agent design check
The same questions as a run-through you answer one at a time, scored against rules you can read in full. No sign-up, and the summary downloads or prints.
Open the check The reasoningGuides
Why the boundary sits where it does, who may call a tool, and what to do when the evidence is not there. Each template links the guides behind it.
Read the guides4 templates are published. More may follow as the guides they rest on get written. Nothing appears on this page until it exists, has a completed example, and is ready to be used.