Pattern
Accelerator with a brake
You might say: speed and gate
A fast path increases flow while an independent gate limits what can continue. The useful system tunes both together, and builds the brake before the accelerator.
- Ask
- What accelerates the work, and what stops unsafe output before it spreads?
Sources
- Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, 8. The strength of negative feedback loops
Negative feedback loops are ubiquitous in systems. Nature evolves them and humans invent them as controls to keep important system states within safe bounds.
- Anthropic, Building effective AI agents, Workflow: Evaluator-optimizer
In the evaluator-optimizer workflow, one LLM call generates a response while another provides evaluation and feedback in a loop.
- Matt Pocock, Software Factories for Real Engineers, Software Factories for Real Engineers
So most folks start building accelerators … That's why starting with accelerators is backwards.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Accelerator with a brake" (pattern-accelerator-brake) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal