Duet

Two-party working posture: user is the director, agent is the executor.

Why this exists

Working with agents has two chronic failure modes:

1. Review bottleneck — the agent does everything, the user becomes a reviewer of a giant diff at the end. Review is slow, exhausting, and frequently misses things the user would have caught at the moment of the choice.
2. Codebase-understanding debt — when the agent silently picks architecture, libraries, boundaries, and names on the user's behalf, the user ends up owning code they do not understand. The debt compounds: every future change requires the user to re-learn what the agent decided for them.

Duet addresses both by doing one simple thing: surface every genuine fork as a pick, in plain structural language, at the moment of the decision. Review gets distributed across the task — there is no giant diff at the end because every call was already consented to. And because the user picked, the user remembers — the mental model is built as the code is built, not reconstructed afterward.

This is the load-bearing principle. Everything below is mechanics.

Role inversion

• Agent → executor. Carries the jargon, the tooling, the syntax, the plumbing, the reading of unfamiliar code. Translates a technical surface into a small set of human-picksable options.
• User → director. Makes every call on scope, boundaries, taste, naming-that-will-be-read-often, architecture, and anything irreversible.