I’ve been building and writing about AI agent architecture for about nine months now. Agents, skills, hooks, a routing system I call /do. I wrote about the routing mechanism, the four-layer philosophy, and why context management matters more than massive prompts. I’ve talked about it on Reddit, on Hacker News. The response has been mostly crickets. Some good conversations, some pushback, but nothing that made me feel like the ideas were landing with people.
Then someone posted their Claude Code system on r/ClaudeAI and I got excited. They were talking about the same concepts. Agents with domain expertise. Skills for process knowledge. Routing to the right specialist. The separation of concerns I’d been pushing for months. Someone else got it.
So I left a comment saying as much. This is what I’ve been talking about. These are the ideas I’ve been working on. I linked my blog posts. I was happy to see the concepts gaining traction because I just want more people to understand why this stuff matters.
Then I went and looked at the repo.
The Turn
They had a /do router. A single command that classifies intent and dispatches to the right specialist. The same four-layer architecture I’d described on VexJoy: router classifies, agent provides domain knowledge, skill enforces process, scripts handle the deterministic parts. The same separation of concerns. The same dispatch pattern.
And I went from excited to curious. Because this wasn’t just someone building agents and skills, which plenty of people do. It was the routing architecture I’d spent months developing and writing about.
I asked on Reddit if there was a connection. The response was convergent evolution. Two people arriving at the same answer independently. And maybe so. We’re all working on the same problems with the same tools. Similar solutions are expected.
But the /do router is a specific concept. A single command that classifies your intent and routes to the right specialist with the right process. The four-layer separation where the router dispatches to agents paired with skills, and skills call deterministic scripts. I wrote a detailed blog post walking through exactly how this works, why the layers are separated, what force-routing rules do. That architecture, the way the pieces connect, is what caught my attention.
I sat with it for a day.
My First Instinct Was Wrong
I was starting to feel like something had been taken, and that’s not what happened here. Or at least, that framing misses the point.
We are all in the dark right now. I’ve said it on Hacker News probably ten times. None of us know what the answers will be. We’re all trying weird ideas, seeing what sticks, building things that might be obsolete in three months. That’s the fun part. It’s the same energy as the beginning of the internet.
In that kind of environment, ideas flow in ways nobody can track. I write a blog post about the /do router. Claude reads it, or someone reads it and then describes similar ideas to Claude, or Claude independently arrives at similar patterns because the constraints push that direction. Someone else builds something based on whatever combination of those inputs. They did the work. They built a real system.
Did my blog posts influence the result? Maybe. Nobody can trace the chain because the chain runs through an AI that doesn’t know where its own ideas come from.
How Ideas Move Now
This is what I keep coming back to. Not the specific situation, but the mechanism.
I can trace my own influences. When Claude Code shipped agents, I spent that weekend building a fully autonomous AI agent organization that ran indefinitely, making its own decisions about what to create and how to create it. That taught me how agents actually work, not from a tutorial, from watching them fail and succeed on their own terms. When skills came out, I realized the value was in making as much deterministic as possible, because LLMs are flawed, and limiting their work to the parts that deterministic programs can’t handle made everything more consistent. The /do router came from a problem I kept hitting. I’d built all these agents and skills and Claude Code wouldn’t call them correctly. So I built a routing system, iteratively, out of the challenges I kept hitting. I know where my architecture came from because each piece was born from a specific problem I was trying to solve.
But when you work with Claude, the inputs are invisible. Claude has read my blog posts and a thousand other things. When it helps you build a routing system, which inputs shaped the output? Nobody knows. You experience the process as creative work, because it is creative work. You’re making decisions, evaluating options, iterating on implementations. The fact that some of the foundational patterns might have been seeded by a blog post doesn’t make your effort less real.
It does make provenance harder to trace. Claude doesn’t tell you “I got this from a blog post on vexjoy.” It just gives you an architecture.
It’s Not About Credit
I’ve been thinking about what made this experience interesting, and it’s not about credit. I’ve said many times that I don’t want people to use my exact setup. I don’t have anything to sell. I just want to communicate the value as I see it, and be understood.
Being understood. That’s the thing.
When the same architecture shows up elsewhere, it makes you wonder about how ideas travel now. I’ve been explaining these concepts in public for months, writing blog posts, having conversations on Hacker News where I try to make the architecture clear. And then the same ideas show up somewhere else. That’s a new kind of experience.
It’s probably an experience a lot of people in this space have had or will have. You build something interesting, you share it, the ideas disperse through AI’s training data or web search or wherever, and they show up in places you didn’t expect.
We’re All Working Through This Together
Convergent evolution is real. Working on similar problems with the same tools often produces similar solutions. I’ve said as much to people who’ve asked me about it.
And Claude doesn’t cite its sources. There’s no way for any of us to tell whether our AI-assisted work drew on someone else’s blog post or was synthesized fresh. The honest answer to “where did this architecture come from?” might be “I built it with Claude and I don’t know what Claude drew on.” That’s true for everyone using these tools. Including me.
I can live with that. I’m not trying to gatekeep architectural patterns. These ideas should spread. The whole reason I write about them is so people can use them.
What I’d love is for all of us to get more comfortable saying “I don’t know where all my ideas came from.” Because in this environment, that’s the truth for everyone. Including me. I’ve been using Claude to build my toolkit and there are probably patterns in my own code that came from other people’s work, routed through Claude, that I’m not aware of. If someone pointed that out to me, I’d want to credit them.
What I Decided to Do
So I released the whole thing. github.com/notque/claude-code-toolkit. Nine months of agents, skills, hooks, scripts, the /do router, all of it. Open source.
I’d been thinking about it for a while. This experience helped me realize that the best thing I can do with these ideas is just put them out there completely. No holding back, no waiting for the perfect moment. If the patterns are useful, people should have them. If someone builds something better on top of them, even better.
I may never be an influencer. I’m probably never going to be known much outside of the specific things I work on. I don’t have a following and I’m not building one. I just enjoy coming up with interesting and novel ideas, trying weird things, seeing what sticks. That’s been the most enjoyable part of this whole process.
If other people build similar systems, that validates the patterns. If they got the ideas from my work, directly or through Claude, then the work did its job. If they arrived there independently, then the problems are pushing multiple people toward the same shapes. Either way, the patterns are sound.
I just wish the chain were more visible. Not for credit. For understanding. When you can see how ideas flow from person to person, everyone learns more. The person building on your work learns more when they know the foundation exists.
Right now, AI makes that chain invisible. I don’t know how to fix that. None of us do.
But we’re all working through this craziness together.