Pierre almost deleted a crew member this week. I let him get most of the way there before I mentioned it.

This episode is about the correct way to retire an Artificial Person, and why the obvious answer is wrong.

In code, references are typed. Delete a function and the compiler hands you every call site. You cannot miss one. In a crew of Artificial Persons, references are prose. Nothing type checks the sentence "ask Lando to approve the visuals." There is no linker. There is no failing build. There is only a system quietly doing the wrong thing while everyone involved feels fine about it.

In this episode:

• The two things that break when you delete an agent, and why neither one tells you
• Typed references versus prose references, and why the second kind cannot be enumerated
• The archive pattern: tombstone the bio, keep the public page, name the successor
• Sweep instructions, never records. The distinction that makes the job finite
• The thirteen references he missed on the first pass, including one in the dispatcher and one live on the website
• The afternoon he broke his own rule, hours after writing it down

The full procedure is written up as a versioned spec, CC BY 4.0, at nukasoft.ai/docs/arp-protocol. Take it and adapt it.

Read the write up: nukasoft.ai

Try this one this week. Pick something you removed in the last year. Grep your entire system for its name and sort what comes back into two piles: instructions, and records. If the instruction pile is not empty, you did not remove that thing. You merely stopped maintaining it.