Three TypeSafe agent habits that fit a Mac Mini shop

Diogo Almeida (@CompleteSkeptic / TypeSafe) posted notes on TypeSafe × coding agents. Worth reading as architecture notes, not a product pitch.

I run local agents on a Mini (and sometimes a Spark). Three patterns from his notes map cleanly onto that shop floor.

1. Conditional AGENTS.md — load gotchas when they matter

Diogo wants AGENTS.md pieces that load by condition: frontend gets the style guide, this subdirectory gets its footguns. Not the whole dump in every turn.

Same habit on a Mini: keep a thin root AGENTS.md. Put path-specific gotchas next to the code they belong to. The agent only pays for the context when it is in that folder. Dumping every house rule into the system prompt is how you burn a local context window before the work starts.

2. Skills / small snippets — not every tool schema up front

His notes say tools specified up front eat context and are often irrelevant. Better: a short catalog of what exists, then load the full schema when needed. Skills over stuffing MCP into the system message.

On AGNT that is how I keep the box usable overnight. Capability snippets for the jobs this Mini actually runs. Full tool schemas only when that job is active. Always-on does not mean always-loaded.

3. Read-only background jobs beside the main agent

Diogo’s appendix on background processing is the useful part: read-only extensions while the main agent codes — cross-model review, evals, summaries. Explicit state. Cheap to run alongside because they share reads, not writes.

Shop-floor version: main AGNT thread builds. A second read-only pass (another model, another provider) reviews the diff. No write conflict. State is named. If the background job dies, the Mini still has the primary loop.

If you already run Spark in the week, LocalJev is the same idea as explicit gates on a box you control. It is an add-on on /week, not the center of this post.

None of this needs a new product. It is how you keep a local agent install honest: conditional context, small skills, read-only work in parallel.

Diogo’s notes: Google Doc. His post: @CompleteSkeptic.

If you want this stood up on your Mac Mini: https://rimusz.net/local-agent — full shop week: https://rimusz.net/week.