Agentic preparation checklist

The cheap path is a giant system prompt that lists every rule the agent needs to know. It works — until the prompt is 15,000 tokens and nobody on the team will touch it.

Instead, the checklist agent loads short markdown skills on demand: one for each case stage, one for each evidence category. Anyone on the team can open the file, change the rule, and watch the eval harness re-grade.

• Skills live in version control as .md files
• Agent loads only what’s relevant to the stage
• Knowledge editable by non-engineers (ops, legal, founders)
• Reviewable in PRs like any other code

The agent’s tools are thin wrappers around the same services the rest of the app uses — document classification, booking parsing, jurisdiction lookup. No mock-bench. The agent runs against production-grade tooling from day one.

Side effect: agent failures and human failures show up in the same dashboards. Telemetry is unified.

The agent runs an explicit tool-use loop: think → pick a tool → read the result → decide if more work is needed → exit. Each turn is logged, and the loop has a hard turn limit so a misfire can never run forever.