Is a broken system that works still broken?

In the local vernacular, that would be a solid "Yeah, nah, but yeah."

Here is the situation I found.

Clare, my publishing agent, hit this in its chain of thought while publishing a blog article I wrote:

"the site repo is there, but AGENTS.md is only readable as the Claude user"

I used Claude Code to build the site, and apparently in the Claude world that means Claude has ownership forever. Sneaky little bugger. I told it to do a hand-off to the Hermes agent, and it wrote a very nice document, which I assumed was all that was needed. It had outflanked me on that one.

All my agents need to publish to that site, and they all, independently, developed workarounds to the Claude block. This was just the first time I noticed the problem in a chain of thought.

So I asked Maxi, my sysadmin agent, to investigate.

It came back with:

Agent	onet-site-publishing
Maxi	No general site skill; only a site note inside maxi-blog-publish
Clare	Yes, profile-local
Mandy	Yes, profile-local
Dawn	Yes, profile-local
Ace	No
Vera	No, appropriately

Which was another problem all in itself.

The site publishing skill is meant to be a shared skill, maintained in one place. Instead each agent had its own skill, each with its own specific workaround to the Claude problem. Ace, which was meant to, did not have the skill at all, and had been using the generic website publish skill each time to figure out how to post.

That is three levels of broken stacked on top of each other. Yet the workflow still worked.

But you know how helpful agents are. I presented the problem to Maxi who, as a helpful agent, helpfully asserted:

"The present arrangement is wrong.

There should be:

1. One canonical shared onet-site-publishing skill containing the repository, build, staging, deployment and verification mechanics.
2. The skill should be loaded through a shared, read-only skills.external_dirs location by Clare, Ace, Mandy and Dawn.
3. Authority should remain in each agent's remit, not be manufactured by possessing the skill. The shared skill should enforce the universal rule that public deployment requires your explicit instruction for the exact material.
4. Author-specific details such as Steve versus collaborator frontmatter should be branches within that one skill, not four independently maintained procedures.
5. The canonical operator guide at /srv/onet-site/AGENTS.md should remain the live operational source the shared skill directs everyone to read.

So: Dawn was missed, Ace is missing, and the separate skill copies should be consolidated rather than patched one by one. Yesterday's change fixed the immediate access fault, but it exposed the underlying duplication problem rather neatly."

No shit. Nice of it to figure that out, since it was the one that put it all in place to start with.

Easy to blame the agent, but really I was kicking myself for not taking more notice of what it actually did versus what it reported.

Anyway, the story has a happy ending.

I told Maxi:

1. take over everything that currently points to Claude. Make it generic to Hermes.
2. Rationalise skills so that common skills agents need are in one place.

Twenty minutes or so of furious agentic thinking and working ensued, and resulted in this.

There is now one publishing skill:

/home/hermes/.hermes/shared-skills/site/onet-site-publishing/SKILL.md

It is used by:

• Ace
• Clare
• Dawn
• Mandy

The three contradictory profile-local versions were removed. Ace, who previously had no publishing skill, now has the same canonical procedure as everyone else.

The skill provides mechanics only. Each agent’s remit and your item-specific instruction still govern whether publication is authorised.

Other consolidated skills

The migration also consolidated:

• 12 general-purpose skills shared by Ace, Dawn and Mandy;
• website-content, shared by Ace, Dawn and Mandy;
• cross-agent-coordination, shared by Ace, Clare, Dawn and Mandy;
• onet-site-publishing, shared by all four.

I removed 43 obsolete profile-local skill directories.

Clare retains her specialised editorial website-content skill rather than receiving the creative-team version. Vera remains outside these operational skill sets.

Verification

Profile	Shared skills resolved	Duplicate names
Ace	15	0
Dawn	15	0
Mandy	15	0
Clare	2	0

That number was a bit of a shock in itself. Fifteen skills consolidated and 43 stale local copies gone. Clare probably should be using the shared skill for blog posts and a specific LinkedIn skill, but it is fine for now.

Agents say confident, knowledgeable things. They declare their work complete with authority and report "57 test cases passed". And credit where credit is due, the thing they built does in fact work.

But if you do not watch them closely, what they build is a tower of working brokenness.

The real lesson in this is; Without vigilant oversight, what agents build may work, but it will still be broken. And sure as eggs, at some point it is going to fail in the worst possible way.