Collaboration in an agentic workplace

The method is scoped to a single practitioner and their agents. This article covers how we can work together where agents are involved.

Gates move up

When one person’s gates move from line-level to judgment-level, everyone who interacts with their work faces the same shift. Good collaborators already frontload questions before reviewing someone else’s work. Agents make that instinct systematic and parallel. Multiple constrained perspectives run simultaneously. Evaluative reviewers don’t see the implementation plan. A separate pass checks the analysis for communication quality.

The output consolidates multiple specialized perspectives into something a single person couldn’t produce in the same timeframe. But the level at which collaboration happens has shifted.

Documentation as shared surface

One practitioner’s well-structured documentation becomes context for another practitioner’s agents. Practitioner B doesn’t read Practitioner A’s architecture investigation. Practitioner B asks an agent to answer a specific question with that material as context. The documentation-as-signal shift means the consumers are someone else’s agents, not just your own.

Documentation becomes the shared surface between people who may never read each other’s writing. Quality maintenance was already a problem before agents. Agents amplify it because they consume documentation constantly and can’t distinguish stale signal from fresh. Applying agents on schedule to verify documentation is a plausible answer. I haven’t tested it enough to know.

Trust calibration

Collaborators can observe how someone directs agents — how they scope context, where they insert themselves, what they catch. These signals join the per-peer calibration alongside the traditional ones.

Someone reviewing a PR can run their own agentic analysis, get a high-level understanding, dive into specific highlighted code, pose their own questions to check if anything was missed.

Sharing skills

I can share the skeleton. I can’t share the dynamic.

Sharing a skill with a colleague starts a conversation, and the conversation scales with the complexity of what’s shared. A ticket template transfers with minimal discussion. A review workflow carries enough embedded judgment that sharing it is effectively proposing a way of working together.

Starting from someone’s specific, opinionated skill is better than starting from a cleaned-up general version. The specific version carries the reasoning behind the choices. The friction of pushing back on someone else’s specific choices — figuring out where your judgment diverges — is where understanding comes from.

Open threads

The direction for compliance is clear — higher-order review replacing line-by-line — but regulatory bodies and cultural consensus will take time to get there. Whether the review process itself can be the auditable artifact is still open.

Team coordination is emerging from practice. One practitioner builds a process for their own workflow. Someone else adapts it. The adapted version reveals where the team’s approach is consistent and where it’s individual. Organizations may need to shift from standardizing process to evaluating outcomes.

The method’s individual scope is a declared boundary.