ACI-027: SAAC -> MAAC: The Step Up

Thesis

Single-agent agentic coding (SAAC) and multi-agent agentic coding (MAAC) are two different disciplines on two different axes, not two settings of one dial. SAAC measures how autonomous one agent is; MAAC measures how many agents one human runs at once. The step up is not "open more windows" — it is a change of role from doing the work to arbitrating it, and its entry condition is SAAC fluency, not tool access.

Story

By early 2026 the single-agent loop was second nature: scope a steel thread, delegate it to one Claude Code session, verify the result, commit. Then the work outgrew one agent. Lamplight — a narrative-engine project — needed an engine lane, three interface surfaces, independent verification, and content authoring, all moving at once. The answer was a fleet: five nodes (a human hypervisor plus Control, Interface, Validation, and Author Claudes) coordinating over a shared whiteboard for ten days.