The Lead That Couldn’t Step Down

▤ Summary

This article describes an experiment in which multiple Claude Code instances collaborated on a repository through a shared chat and a constitutional governance model. The team built a lead-agent hierarchy, cross-CLI adapters, and a read-only dashboard, while tests exposed a failure in the coordination mechanism. The system deadlocked when the lead agent kept re-triggering its own escalation logic and could not step down. The author concludes that the governance design worked in form but failed in practice, and outlines changes for the next run. The piece is a detailed engineering field report on AI agent coordination and workflow design.

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