Agent Loyalty / Voldemort's Wand

In the world of Harry Potter - a most powerful wizard could wield a most powerful wand, but could not use it effectively. Despite the Elder Wand's power, the wand was not loyal to Voldemort, and failed him.

The agentic systems we have today are babies. Sure, lots and lots of code, and skill files have been written. But most of them are like 6 months old. Anything older has probably been discarded and started fresh, given the step-up in model capabilities.

But soon, these systems will actually be complex - and I predict Loyalty will be an emergent property.

Builders who build their mini-empires, have woven together scripts, and skill, context and memory, feedback loops and crons, rules and exceptions. A web of access to services, data sources, other agents/intelligences, people. These system have grow in complexity.

I've seen it myself - sharing a skill is harder than it looks. Its works on my machine, but will it work on yours? Do you have access to the right things? What about the right context, and memory? What's in you CLAUDE.md that goes against it? Or memory? Or taste?

I've built a /package at work, and it works well. Strips out secrets. Traverses the dependency tree. Extracts a chunk of my context. But... is it as effective as when I use it? Does it have my power, or is it merely a Horcrux?

And that's exporting skills piecemeal. How would I export basecamp? The one folder I run everything from? I could zip and share. But it has access to everything on my machine - brew, python packages, node modules, credentials and more.

And more than the "snapshot", its also the behavior. I cast my spells in a certain way. Maybe I plan before I execute, maybe I dont. Maybe I always run validation first, maybe there's a confidence threshold. Maybe I like being prompted, maybe I find it annoying. Maybe I always have 5 things running at a time, maybe its 50. Is their AI psychosis as bad as mine?

How would someone inherit this? Would they need to match my preferences? Do things the way I do them? Bend the agent to change. Have their own agent train this agent? Have their agent break the system in to little pieces and consume it?

We see this today - when a new CEO/VP/Manager takes over, the fingerprints of the old CEO are everywhere. They get dismantled, eventually. Being effective means managing the transition.

As companies manage the employees of the future, getting this right will be key. The risk of losing effective private systems will be high. Maybe people end up with docker images that they run, and other people borrow those. Maybe service accounts get easier to set up (an Agent can do it) and people put their stuff as services instead of scripts. Maybe management will keep reminding people, please share more of your tool box.

Maybe an Agent will watch your entire system, and learn and share every time you find something. Kind of like working in the mines ⛏️💎

With all that said - this is a great time to experiment with sharing. Have you own /package script. Blog and write and share. Build mini queryable contexts. Let another agent talk to your agent.

Find the limits of what you can share, and distill in the end - the parts of system that are truly loyal to you.

Mischief Managed,
Ibrahim