Part 2: what changed when I stopped treating my multi-agent system as an idea and started running it for real

In the first part, I explained why I ended up building a multi-agent flow instead of continuing to push everything into a single conversation. The idea still made sense: separating responsibilities, using different models depending on the phase, and keeping human approval before implementation gave me more order, better cost control, and less noise. But at that stage I was still solving the conceptual problem. This second stage was different. It was no longer about defending the idea, but about actually running it. And that was where the problems appeared that do not show up in a diagram or in a strong narrative: permissions, AI systems that do not behave the same way, processes that need a real interactive terminal, configuration that ages badly, and orchestration decisions that sound good on paper but do not hold up in practice. The biggest change: I stopped thinking in terms of a pipeline and started thinking in terms of a runtime I think the best way to explain this evolution is th