singularity-forge/docs/dev/building-coding-agents/23-evolution-across-project-scale.md
Jeremy 872b0adb48 docs: reorganize into user-docs/ and dev/ subdirectories
Split flat docs/ into user-docs/ (guides, config, troubleshooting) and
dev/ (ADRs, architecture, extension guides, proposals). Updated
docs/README.md index to reflect new paths.
2026-04-10 09:25:31 -05:00

1.6 KiB
Raw Permalink Blame History

Evolution Across Project Scale

Phase Transitions (All 4 Models Converge)

01k LOC: The Monolithic Phase

  • Everything fits in one context window
  • Agent reads entire codebase, makes globally coherent decisions
  • Orchestrator is simple, manifest barely needed
  • This is where most demos live

1k10k LOC: The Modular Phase

  • Codebase no longer fits in one context window
  • What breaks first: consistency — agent sees fragments that gradually diverge
  • Requirements: modular context assembly, manifest as essential map, interface contracts, convention enforcement (linting, formatting)

10k50k LOC: The Architectural Phase

  • Relationships between components become non-obvious
  • Changing one thing might affect ten others through indirect dependencies
  • What breaks: planning quality — planner can't understand full system
  • Requirements: dependency-aware context assembly, impact analysis before execution, more conservative/incremental plans

50k100k+ LOC: The Organizational Phase

  • System of systems — no single agent context can reason about the whole thing
  • What breaks: integration — interactions between components become so numerous that integration testing becomes the bottleneck
  • Requirements: hierarchical planning (system-level planner → component-level agents), continuous integration verification, possibly distributed orchestrator, hierarchy of manifests

The Meta-Insight

The architecture of your agentic system should mirror the architecture of the software it's building. Microservices projects need a more distributed orchestrator. Monolithic projects can use a simpler one.