The person watching said yes
A module-by-module costing of text-to-SQL pipelines, a coupling inside Claude Code skills that no catalogue records, and 133 overreaching agent actions that ran because a human approved them.
How we Organise
What each part of a pipeline actually earns, priced separately
Seventeen pipeline configurations were priced module by module rather than as one accuracy figure. Only one module earned its cost on every model.
We tell a client to work out what one successful outcome costs, from its own costs and its own test results rather than by hand. This shows the shape of the error the alternative makes. A team reading an aggregate figure off a leaderboard cannot see that most of what it pays for earns nothing on the model it runs. One task family carries the whole result, and engineering time sits outside the comparison.
How we Build
Inside a Claude Code skill, the prose and the code move together
Across 8,351 plugins most components evolve independently. Inside skills they do not: prose instructions and the scripts implementing them change together, and 78 per cent of those co-changes are functionally coupled.
A team following us catalogues what it builds and declares what each thing depends on. Every dependency a catalogue can express runs between two catalogued things. This coupling runs inside one of them. So a team can hold a complete catalogue and have declared nothing about the joint most likely to come apart. Moving together is weaker than one breaking the other.
How we Assure
People who could refuse approved almost all of it
Supervising an agent through a simulated day, participants let 148 overreaching actions run. Of those, 133 followed a human approval. Only 15 ran under a standing rule.
We ask that somebody is named for each agent, able to halt it, and has done so at least once. Both halves held here throughout. The exposure stayed open anyway, because a person shown one action at a time approves most of what they see, including what nobody asked for. The participants were not technical and the day was simulated.