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BUILD TBD

Build TBD · Agent-Centered Design

Field Notes from the Agent Floor

Short notes from inside a working agent operation. Each one takes a single measured finding, draws it, and shows the arithmetic that produced it.

Published field notes

  1. The cost of a file nobody readsField Note 01 opens Agent Centered Design — Build TBD's research programme translating Lean's discipline of flow and waste to agent operations. The first waste: over-production.No. 01 · 29 August 2026 · 4 min read

What a field note is

One finding
A note answers one question about where effort goes, and stops. It is not a survey and not an argument for a product.
Measured, not modelled
The numbers come from our own instrumented operation, and each carries a label saying so. Where a figure is an industry estimate rather than ours, it says that instead.
Arithmetic in the open
Anything derived is shown as a derivation — the rows, the total, and each operation applied to it — so a reader who distrusts the headline can check it.

These notes are the public face of our research programme into how agentic systems waste effort, and how much of that waste is recoverable without asking the agents to do less. It is called Agent-Centered Design.