sentinel-designlisted

# Sentinel Design Most agents in this plugin act on an artefact. The spec-writer edits a spec, the tdd-agent writes tests, the integration-agent commits and merges, the harness-gc rewrites stale documentation. Their object of care is a thing in the repository, and you judge them by what they did to that thing. A **sentinel** is different. Its object of care is not the codebase, the pipeline, or the harness — it is **the human**. A sentinel protects and supports the understanding and judgement of the person in the workflow. It informs, challenges, surfaces, or warns. It never fixes, writes, merges, or decides. > **Sentinel** — any agent whose primary purpose is to protect and > support the understanding and judgement of the human in the workflow. The category emerged organically. Four agents — the decision-discipline triad (`carpaccio`, `advocatus-diaboli`, `choice-cartographer`) plus the `reservoir-warden` — and later the `cost-estimator` were all built to the same shape without anyone naming the shape. This skill names it, so that the next one can be built deliberately rather than rediscovered. ## Why sentinels exist: the debts AI moves upstream The category has a reason to exist, and it comes from Margaret-Anne Storey's **triple-debt model** (*From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI*, 2026; arXiv:2603.22106, expanded in ACM Queue). Storey argues that generative AI produces code faster than a team can comprehend it,