Case Study: The Lamplight Fleet

Five nodes in June 2026, one of them the human hypervisor. No catastrophes.

This is the worked example behind the third year, and it travels with 301 The Step Up. Where the MeetZaya case study shows single-agent work failing at the project level, this one shows multi-agent work holding together at the coordination level: a fleet of agents building a real system in parallel, kept coherent by a shared whiteboard, an independent verifier, and a human supplying taste. It is told in three parts — how the fleet is configured, a single feature traced across the seam between agents, and what happened when things strained and how the protocol made the strain legible before it became damage.