The OSBR Handbook

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Multiple AI Agents ​

Every OSBR developer keeps at least two coding agents usable every day — for example Claude Code and one other — with authentication, permissions, and working environments already configured so that switching between them is a matter of minutes, not a project. When one provider fails, rate-limits, silently changes model quality, or ships a breaking spec change, work continues on the other. This page is the discipline for holding that second path warm, not merely theoretically available. It is the AI-layer companion to the AI Usage Guideline (how we work with agents at all) and to Policies as Plugins (the shared standard every agent is held to).

The failure this prevents is concrete: a whole team blocked for an afternoon because one vendor is down, one account is throttled, or a model update quietly regressed on the exact task we depend on. A backup agent that nobody has logged into for a month is not a backup — it is a cold spare that will itself need debugging at the worst possible moment.

This page is where OSBR's Be Strong value becomes operational: strong = never single-point-dependent. Be Nice: an agent-agnostic ticket and a synced policy version are a gift to whoever picks the task up next. Be Kind: doing the dull readiness check on the calm day is what spares a teammate the bad one.

How to read this policy ​

  • Requirement levels follow RFC 2119, as elsewhere in the handbook. MUST / MUST NOT are absolute. SHOULD / SHOULD NOT state a strong default overridable only with a documented reason. MAY marks a free choice.
  • Named practice. Where a rule adopts a standard resilience practice, the practice is named inline and cited under References. We adopt the criteria — vendor-neutrality, N+1 redundancy, bus-factor thinking — and right-size them for an SME, not the infrastructure of the reference setups.
  • Deviations are allowed but, as everywhere in the handbook, must be deliberate and justified in the project's design notes.

1. Goal ​

Development at OSBR never has a single point of failure at the AI-provider layer. On any project, on any day, a developer — or the AI agent working beside them — can move the current task from one coding agent to another and keep going, because the second agent is already authenticated, already permissioned, already pointed at the same repository and the same policy standard.

Concretely, the goal is that the answer to "provider X is down / throttled / just changed — can we still ship today?" is always yes, and proving it takes minutes. This is the AI-layer expression of Be Strong: never single-point-dependent. We treat a coding agent the way a serious operation treats any critical supplier — as one interchangeable source among several, not as the foundation the whole business rests on.

This is standard resilience engineering applied to our development tools. Vendor-neutrality and avoiding lock-in keep our choices open; multi-vendor sourcing removes the single supplier as a single point of failure; redundancy (N+1) keeps a spare warm; Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and bus-factor thinking demand the work survive the loss of any one dependency; portability and abstraction over provider-specific features are what make the switch cheap when we need it.

2. Responsibility ​

  • Every developer keeps at least two coding agents installed, authenticated, and actually exercised — not just installed. If you have not run a real task through your backup agent this week, you do not have a backup.
  • Whoever writes a ticket, command, or procedure writes it agent-agnostically (§3-2). Per the Development Guide, a ticket states the task and its acceptance criteria; one that only makes sense to a single agent is a lock-in defect, the same way a synonym is a naming defect.
  • Whoever bumps a policy plugin on one agent MUST bring every other agent to the same version in the same change (§3-4). Divergent policy versions across agents mean the same code passes on one agent and fails on another — silent, maddening drift.
  • The whole team treats "can we switch providers today?" as a standing readiness question, not a disaster-day discovery. Readiness is verified on a cadence (§3-5), not assumed.

3. Practices ​

3-1. Keep two agents warm, not one warm and one cold ​

  • You MUST keep at least two coding agents usable daily, with auth, permissions, and environment ready to switch. Two is the floor (N+1 redundancy over a single agent); a third is cheap insurance where a project's risk warrants it.
  • Exercise the spare. A backup path you never run rots — credentials expire, config drifts, the CLI is three versions behind. You SHOULD route real work through each agent regularly so the switch is proven, not hoped for. This is the difference between a hot standby and a cold one: only the hot standby is a real BCP control.
  • Keep authentication for each agent current and independent — separate credentials, no shared token that takes both down at once. Correlated failure defeats the point of redundancy: two agents behind one dependency are one agent wearing two hats.
  • Keep the environments (repo checkout, tooling, MCP servers, secrets access) reachable from either agent, so switching is "point the other agent at this repo," not "spend a day rebuilding a workspace."

3-2. Write tickets, commands, and procedures agent-agnostically ​

  • Tickets, runbooks, slash-command procedures, and project-memory guidance MUST be written to the task and the repository, not to one vendor's quirks. State what must be true (the acceptance criteria, the files, the checks), not which agent's private feature you happen to be using.
  • This is abstraction over provider-specific features: depend on the capability (edit files, run tests, open a PR), which every serious coding agent has, not on a single vendor's proprietary surface. Where a provider-specific feature genuinely earns its keep, isolate it behind a thin, documented seam so the fallback path is obvious — the same portability discipline that keeps application code off a single cloud's proprietary API.
  • A good test: could the other agent pick up this ticket and finish it with no rewrite? If not, the ticket is coupled to a provider — fix the ticket. Agent-agnostic wording is to provider lock-in what one-word-per-concept is to naming drift: cheap to hold if you hold it continuously, expensive to unwind once it spreads.

3-3. Treat a provider change as an expected event, not a surprise ​

  • A rate-limit, an outage, a quality regression after a model update, or a breaking spec/API change is a when, not an if — plan for it. The response is a rehearsed switch, not an emergency.
  • When a provider degrades, switch first, report second: move the task to the warm agent, keep shipping, then record what happened (which provider, what symptom, what you switched to) so the team sees the pattern. Recurrent degradation at one provider is a supplier-management signal, not just a bad afternoon.
  • Never let one provider's convenience quietly become a hard dependency. Each time you reach for a feature only one agent has, you SHOULD ask whether you are re-introducing the single point of failure this policy exists to remove.

3-4. Keep policy plugins synchronized to the same version across agents ​

  • The OSBR policy plugins are the shared evaluation standard every agent is held to — the same standard the Quality Gate enforces, packaged as described in Policies as Plugins. They MUST be at the same version across all agents you use. The same code reviewed by two agents on two plugin versions gets two answers — that divergence is a correctness bug in our process, not a quirk to work around.
  • When you bump a plugin on one agent, you MUST bump it on the others in the same change, and note the version. Pin the version explicitly rather than letting each agent float to "latest" independently — floating versions re-create the drift by default.
  • Verify the versions match as part of the readiness check (§3-5), the same way a rename is not done until every surface is updated: policy sync is not done until every agent reports the same version.

3-5. Verify switch-readiness on a cadence ​

  • On a regular cadence (SHOULD be at least weekly), each developer confirms the fallback is real: each agent authenticates, runs a real task, and reports the same policy-plugin version. A backup asserted but never verified is BCP theatre — it fails exactly when it is finally needed.
  • Treat a failed readiness check like a broken build: fix the cold agent now, while there is no pressure, not on the day the primary is down. The whole value of N+1 is that the spare is known-good before the failure, not diagnosed during it.

4. Quick Checklist ​

Before relying on "we can always switch," confirm:

  • [ ] At least two coding agents are installed, authenticated, and have run a real task this week.
  • [ ] Each agent has independent, current credentials — no shared token that fails both at once.
  • [ ] Either agent can reach this repo, its tooling, and its secrets with no day-long setup.
  • [ ] Tickets/commands/procedures read agent-agnostically — the other agent could finish them with no rewrite.
  • [ ] Policy plugins are pinned to the same version across every agent, bumped together.
  • [ ] The last switch-readiness check passed (auth + real task + matching plugin version).

5. OSBR Values in Practice ​

  • Be Nice — an agent-agnostic ticket and a synced policy version are a gift to the next developer, who can pick up the task on whichever agent they have without hitting a wall you left behind. Portability is consideration made durable.
  • Be Kind — do the unglamorous readiness check on the calm day so a teammate is not stranded on the bad one. Sparing others a 3am scramble by keeping the spare genuinely ready is kindness that costs you a few minutes and saves them an afternoon.
  • Be Strong — never single-point-dependent. Strength here is refusing to let one vendor's outage, throttle, or quiet quality change decide whether OSBR ships today. Keep the second path warm and proven so no single provider can stop the work.

Two warm agents, agent-agnostic work, and synchronized policy are how OSBR stays strong at the AI layer — dependent on no single provider, ready to switch before we ever have to.

References ​

Resilience & continuity practice

Redundancy & bus-factor

Related OSBR standards

  • AI Usage Guideline — how we work with AI agents at all; this page is its no-single-provider companion.
  • Policies as Plugins — the policy plugins that must stay version-synced across agents (§3-4).
  • Quality Gate — the shared evaluation standard every agent, on any provider, is held to.
  • Development Guide — agent-agnostic tickets, commands, and pull-request procedure.