mfowler
737ef81066
Same topology/behaviour as builder-adversary (loop pair, phase machine, claim()/review() handoff, machine-docs coordination, cold verification) but the role + kickoff prompts are compressed to minimal tokens, keeping every load-bearing rule. Config and plans are unchanged. The separate agent-orchestrator-benchmark repo runs a head-to-head token comparison. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Builder/Adversary example — minimal-prompt variant
Same as ../builder-adversary in every way that matters — Builder +
Adversary loop pair, phase machine, claim(/review( git handoff, machine-docs/ coordination,
cold verification — but the role + kickoff prompts are compressed to minimal tokens, keeping
every load-bearing rule (the commit-prefix handoff, the machine-docs/ file rule, the
WHAT+HOW+EXPECTED+WHERE=STATUS / WHY=JOURNAL anti-anchoring contract, and the WAITING-UNTIL
liveness protocol).
Why: the prompts are sent to the agents on every kickoff, so trimming them trims tokens. Config and
plans are unchanged from the original (they aren't part of the prompt). See the original's README for
the full explanation of the pattern, how to run it, and the work-repo isolation model — the commands
are identical, just --config this directory's agents.toml.
python3 ../../agents.py status --config agents.toml
python3 ../../agents.py up --config agents.toml # needs `claude` on PATH
How small?
prompts/builder.md and prompts/adversary.md here are roughly half to a third the size of the
originals, with the same rules stated tersely. The separate agent-orchestrator-benchmark repo
runs a head-to-head: the same task built independently by this variant and the original (both on
Sonnet), with token counts for each — confirming the minimal prompts still get the job done and
quantifying the savings.