Why Token Usage and Commit Trailers Belong in Agent Workflow
Why usage summaries, commit trailers, and repo-native tooling help both humans and agents understand cost, ownership, model context, and landed boundaries.
Field Notes
The Mycel blog is where we publish the arguments, failure modes, and design tradeoffs that emerged while building protocol-first text systems and operating multiple AI coding agents in one repository.
The goal is not to announce "another agent framework." The goal is to explain what actually has to work when repository state, Git boundaries, and handoffs must survive interruption and parallel work.
Latest
The series now has a framing post, a workflow post, and a metadata post. The newest article explains why token usage summaries and commit trailers belong inside the coordination layer rather than being treated as optional logging detail.
Why usage summaries, commit trailers, and repo-native tooling help both humans and agents understand cost, ownership, model context, and landed boundaries.
A concrete tour of the registry, workcycle, mailbox, commit, push, checklist, and planning-refresh scripts that keep our coordination layer visible and durable.
Why real-world multi-agent repo work breaks down on ownership, lifecycle, and continuation surfaces long before it runs out of clever delegation strategies.
"For real teams, multi-agent coding is a coordination problem before it is an orchestration problem."
Series
This first series turns repo-local practice into public writing. It is intentionally technical, concrete, and explicit about overhead rather than treating process as invisible magic.