There was a time when software teams had boring names: frontend engineer, backend developer, QA tester. Then along came agentic systems, and suddenly every codebase required a menagerie of odd ball characters straight out of a B- Marvel movie, a Ketamine trip, or both.
Steve Yegge started this with polecats and all sorts of creatures like some sort of Harry Potter owl writing your code endlessly. Oh look the “Build Owl" took the code mana from the "Polecat" and powered the steam punk reactor and pushed your code to production while you sleep. I mean it kind of makes sense to use a renaissance fair of magical woodland creatures considering we are writing JavaScript. I'm mean this is JavaScript we're talking about now.
This trend wasn't limited to Yegge's likely drug induced essay as more and more posts appeared that described entire engineering teams as elaborate ecosystems. Agents weren’t tools anymore—they were characters. They had personalities, allegiances, and occasionally complex digestive systems.
Below are documented approaches that may or may not be circulating in the industry.
1. The Star Wars DevOps Cantina
Never have you meet a more villainous hive of nonsense and stupidity. It's a Temu Mos Eisley cantina where everybody speaks TypeScript.
Master Yoda — The 800 second Old Architecture Agent
Speaks in reversed syntax and produces extremely wise but annoyingly cryptic design docs.
“Microservices you want not. Monolith refactor you must.”
C-3PO — Protocol Droids are Useless Make them Write Docs!
Generates 4,000-word explanations for every commit, and with emojis, it just had include emojis!
Darth Vader — The Dark Lord of Code Reviews
Rejects pull requests with a calm mechanical tone.
“Your lack of test coverage… disturbs me.”
Porkins — The Unsung Agentic DevOps Hero!
The true AI agentic hero is right there with you...oh no he's got a problem here.
I can hold it! Boom goes his build
Well hopefully your Luke agent will finish the project off!
2. The Scooby-Doo Agile Mystery Team
Some organizations use the Mystery Machine Methodology, where every engineering problem is treated like a haunted mansion and copious amount of drugs are ingested to make it all makes sense.
Fred — Project Manager Agent
Creates elaborate plans involving trapdoors, pulleys, and Kanban boards. He's like a tech bro PM with an ascot!
Velma — Debugging Agent
Reads stack traces and mutters “Jinkies” when discovering the root cause. As she always loses here damn glasses that she's pretty much useless.
Daphne — UX Agent
Ensures the UI remains stylish while everyone else runs around the mansion screaming. For some reason Fred isn't into her, because he is too busy online.
Shaggy — Prototype Agent
Builds experimental features rapidly, often fueled by pizza and questionable Scooby snack drug dependencies.
Scooby-Doo — Test Agent
Runs integration tests but occasionally eats the test fixtures. Shaggy agent and Scooby agent somehow "talk" to each other making you think the human who made this stupid show was eating those Scooby snacks was really eating a pile of weed gummies.
Every run of the agents concludes the monstrous bugs now haunting your code base was added by these meddling agentic "kids."
3. The Lord of the Rings DevOps Fellowship
For those folks who figured out that Palantiri, Sauron, and the like are bad things or bad guys in the story, but yet still want a heroic quest this framework is quite popular.
Gandalf — System Architect
Appears periodically, declares something profound about distributed systems, and then disappears for several releases. This one tracks to real life grey beards and is not innovative.
Frodo — Deployment Agent
Carries the fragile artifact (the production build) to the cloud provider and for some reason wants to destroy it?
Sam — Reliability Agent
Ensures Frodo doesn’t accidentally delete the codebase, cluster, or other important project artifact. He kind of sucks at his job, but somehow gets it done.
Legolas — Performance Agent
In the movie version has unlimited abilities, in actuality he rarely hits his target, but he still seems cool.
Gimli — Infrastructure Agent
Prefers sturdy, traditional servers and distrusts anything involving AWS functions. He kind of feels like the old guy that used to run your servers and looks like him too.
This group has more agents but it seems like the whole band is more Smaug like as they really need a lot of gold errrr tokens to go on their quest.
The quest generally ends when the troop engages the deployment pipeline and throws my precious build artifact into the fires of Mount /dev/null.
Advice - Don't Pick a Team! Use All of Them
This whole post reeks of last week. Just this morning all teams are having a cross over and booooyyy howdy it's efficient. It's like a Ralph Wiggum loop on crack...it might cost you 1 million tokens a minutes but who cares as soon you'll be saying
“Velma found a bug in the Gandalf spell architecture that Yoda reviewed. We'll have R2-D2 propose a fix so Gimili can chop it up and Darth Vader will force choke out the bugs and get approval from Fred Flintstone and Pickle Rick will launch a cluster or Mister Meeseeks and the build will go straight to production and we'll go lightspeed to global scale!”
Oh now you see...You get it now right? It's all highly technical you know so just nod and pretend this all makes sense.