The Agentic 4

This one didn't start from a problem, so it skips the problem-and-result arc.

It was an experiment: understand how agents coordinate by hearing them improvise jazz.

The result is a live four-agent performance, plus three lessons about agents near the end.

No research, no PRD, just a hunch that music could teach me agents fastest.

I built docs-first anyway, correcting Opportunity Radar's habit of writing docs mid-build.

A brief, a music-theory doc, and an architecture doc came before any audio code.

Each instrumentalist had to pass the same three agent tests as everything else here.

Picking from pre-written phrases, called situated curation, was considered and declined as impractical.

Four distinct voices won over a hive mind, sharing one clock and one per-bar directive.

Oscillators came first, then a scheduler on AudioContext.currentTime once setTimeout drift made the beat wander.

Then the first agent decision: one bass note per bar, then chords, then a Vercel deploy.

Real bugs surfaced at every stage, from a suspended AudioContext to double-counted API latency.

Three instrumentalists, bass, keys, and drums, plus a silent orchestrator setting each bar's directive.

Real chords and synthesized percussion, with no samples anywhere in the signal chain.

Type a style like "12 bar blues in F# minor" and hear an actual attempt at it.

Cut: ADSR knobs, dropped so the text field stayed the one honest interface.

Cut: neural audio synthesis, so "no samples" stayed literally true.

Fixed live: the key was stuck in C major; a parser now reads the key or mood you type.

A shared reference point beats telepathy: one per-bar directive kept four agents sounding like a band.

Constraints make judgment visible: a genre or key gives an agent something real to disagree about.

The hard part wasn't the sound; it was making each agent's judgment actually distinguishable.

Live end to end: four agents, real Claude API calls every bar, real audio.

The scheduler holds tempo and pitch steady across a full 12-bar performance.

Each performance costs a few cents, too little to justify a payment step.