Your Knowledge, Your Model — Part 2: Agents, Iatrogenics

In Part 1, I described the problem and five principles: write everything explicitly, use layers, catalog hallucination traps, mark silent collapses, stay the gateway. But I left out three things deliberately — they needed more room. How to build agents that don't break each other. What not to do when building the system. How to know the system actually works. That's this post. Why one smart agent is the wrong architecture The obvious setup: one powerful agent that reads everything, understands everything, fixes everything. It's flexible, it adapts, it "gets the context." The problem: one agent is one point of iatrogenesis. Iatrogenesis is a medical term — when the treatment causes another disease. The doctor fixes the knee, damages the nerve. The surgeon removes the tumor, introduces infection. In medicine it's a known, studied risk. In information systems almost nobody names it. In agent systems it looks like this: the agent fixes a contradiction in file A, and in doing so creates a n