Principles for (agentic) research: design note

A single self-contained page (index.html), no dependencies, no network, answers and read marks in localStorage (agr_v1). Built from the “Principles for (agentic) research” talk deck and its source post, pitched at principles rather than tools.

What changed from the deck

• Reorganized. The deck ran intro-to-agents, principles for research, principles for agents. The page runs: (1) why do research at all, (2) taste and how it is trained, (3) what an agent is, (4) running agents as a supervisor, (5) your audit. The reader meets the question before the tools, the discriminator before the practices that use it, and every agent practice is attached to the research principle it applies (context is “most problems are communication problems” for a new collaborator; the emulated group is “never work alone”; loop and reiterate is the postmortem).
• Key points only. 38 principles, each as a statement, the reasoning in a few sentences, and a practice. Transitions, personal remarks, career details, anecdotes about named people and most quotes are left out; one quote stays where the quote is the principle.
• Examples are complete. The feedback on the talk asked for concrete examples and for what hooks, tests and rules actually look like. The page shows ten copyable artifacts in full: a CLAUDE.md for a research repository, a hook configuration and the script it runs, a permissions rules block, a test file (hand-computed case, differential test, a double-count guard), a skill file with a “when this was wrong before” section, a sub-agent prompt that emulates a research group with the disagreement rule in it, a Makefile for “script what you can”, a postmortem template, and the delegation sum with worked numbers. The examples are written for the page in the shape of the real files, not copied from any repository.
• Interactive where a question or a calculation earns it. A prompt per section with a saved answer; a ladder explorer for the six rungs (access, what it may do, who checks, what goes wrong first) with the four terms defined; a keep/drop test for generative skills; a delegation calculator (ask + wait + check over the success rate, with the “I cannot check it” case handled as the caveat rather than a number); a jagged-frontier sorter (eight tasks of similar apparent difficulty, mark what you would delegate, reveal the sort by checkability with reasons); a five-question audit for one task with a copyable result; read marks per principle with a progress bar.
• Two diagrams redrawn as inline SVG: generator and discriminator, and the three loop arrangements (open loop, agent as coach, judge by the dozen).

Voice

Peer address, sentence case, American English, typographic quotes, no emoji, no first person. The caveat (“if you don’t know, how do you check?”) opens and closes the agent section, as the talk plan asked.