Stop Treating Code as the Artifact

Once agents write most of the code, stop treating the source files as the artifact. The durable thing is everything upstream of them: the repo-owned spec, the guardrails, the typed boundaries, and the operator surface that determines what code is allowed to exist.

A 3D isometric scene of bees collaboratively maintaining a honeycomb structure. Each bee works on individual cells while checkmarks and warning markers indicate enforced rules. The honeycomb represents a codebase shaped by constraints, with quality emerging from distributed enforcement rather than centralized review, rendered in a clean Airbnb-style miniature aesthetic on a white background.

Symphony is an issue-tracker-based agent orchestration system. It ships a spec, not source code. Symphony is a ghost library: the implementation is downstream of the spec.

That would have looked backwards when human implementation effort dominated the cost structure. A library that mostly ships a spec would have felt unfinished. In an agentic system, the spec is the valuable part. It is the same reason agent-authored PRs should carry the prompt: the description of the work matters more than the particular source files that fell out of it. If the boundaries and contracts are sharp enough, generating the implementation is the easy step.

Once the spec is the artifact, the review question changes:

What description of the work produced this diff?
What code is the agent allowed to write?
What operator surface proves the work happened?

Those are the things I want to maintain. The code is downstream.