Rule
Build and own the machinery that decides whether work is real. Rent everything that merely moves the work around.
Dispatch, queues, worker pools, session management, isolation: that is the conductor, and it is a commodity. Every agent vendor ships more of it each release, and whatever you build in-house will be obsoleted by someone's next launch. We learned this the expensive way: we built the conductor twice, and both died the same death, outrun by the platforms within months. What no platform ships is a binding verdict, computed by checks you wrote for your own codebase, stored where the author can't touch it. The market is full of conductors and advisory reviewers; a verdict that can actually block is the part you must own, because it encodes what your system means by done.
Put It to Work
- Put engineering effort into verdict machinery: gates, checks, refuters, the record of what passed.
- Take orchestration from the platform you already run; replace it freely when a better one ships.
- Keep the verdict layer portable: plain files and commands in your repo, not a vendor feature.
- When a new orchestration surface launches, migrate the conductor and keep the gates unchanged.
Failure Signal
- The team maintains a bespoke dispatcher while validation is still "the agent said it passed."
- A vendor release obsoletes a year of in-house orchestration work.
- Review tooling is advisory: it comments, but nothing blocks.
- Switching platforms would mean losing the definition of done.
Done Looks Like
Orchestration is rented and replaceable; the verdict (the checks, the gate, the record) is yours, survives every platform migration, and is the one thing that can say no.