If you work with a coding agent, count the things watching it right now. Linters. Git hooks. CI. Specs. A memory store. A rules file it's supposed to obey. Half a dozen systems, all making sure the agent builds the right thing the right way.
Now count what keeps you oriented across the eleven things you have in flight. For most of us it's a markdown file we hope we remembered to update.
We spent two years building harnesses for the agent and left our own work on the honor system. Map the tooling on two axes and that gap turns into a specific, hard-to-unsee hole. This post is the map.
(This is part two of three. Part one, The AI orientation tax: it's missing context, not discipline, argued that the cost you're paying is a context bug rather than a character flaw. If you haven't read it, you don't need to. This one stands alone.)
Two loops, not one
