Jack Rudenko

Dependency hell is back. This time it's your agent's config.

Everyone has an agentic harness now. Ours is not special. What nobody has solved is running one across a whole team without every engineer drifting into a private setup.

We run Claude Code across 50 engineers and dozens of client codebases at 10xlabs. Within a few months, the drift was everywhere. One engineer's agent was excellent. The next one ran a config from three months ago. Skills have no version field, so "the frontend skill" meant something different on every laptop. A plugin from a marketplace nobody had vetted turned up inside a client project. Then a Claude Code update changed the settings schema, and unpinned machines quietly fell back to default behavior.

We solved this exact problem 15 years ago. It was called dependency hell, and the fix was lockfiles, semver, and registries. So we built the same thing for agent configs. Famulus is a dependency manager for harness components. Its manifest is called a grimoire. It pins skills, plugins, hooks and MCP servers to exact versions, detects drift across machines, and gives the team lead a say in what a project is allowed to load.

This talk is the war story with numbers. How far have the configs drifted? What broke when we pinned them? Why marketplaces, Microsoft's APM, and skills.sh solve distribution but not team identity or drift. I'll demo Famulus live on a real project and release it as open source on stage.

Then the honest ending. Pinning a skill to a version doesn't tell you whether the agent ever reads it. That is a different problem, and it's still open.