Although this isn't my own article, I wanted to share it because we refer to it often at Imbue because we have an internal system inspired by it. One remarkable side-effect I've discovered of a ratchet system is the increased code quality you get from agents, once you build your workflow to respect them.

I have no qualms about adding patterns like 'interior mutability' in Rust to a ratchet, and forbidding front-line coding agents from incrementing the counter. Then when a feature truly requires it, they can request their parent coordinator agent to bump the count, which gives it a chance to approve or deny the request.

This also gives us the ability to run clean-up agents on the codebase in the background. They are tasked with finding unreasonable instances of the failing ratchets (our ratchet tool spits out file and line numbers), and attempting to fix them.

An early iteration I was mostly amused (and slightly frustrated) to see a cleanup agent stuck in a loop as it tried to clean up `expect()` calls by converting them into `unwrap()`s, which were also forbidden. Then we would see the `unwrap()`s and attempt to fix them by converting them into `expect()`s.