Intel / post

Resolvers: The Routing Table for Intelligence

Source: x.com
Author: Garry TanTop Viber
Date: Indexed Apr 17, 2026

Context

An can have a useful procedure installed yet fail to select it. Garry Tan calls the routing component in the Thin Harness, Fat Skills architecture a resolver: instructions that map a task to the documents or skills it should load.

Tan's follow-up account describes procedures that existed but lacked a route from ordinary user requests. Tan added sample requests with expected destinations and an audit that checks whether each is reachable. These checks address two different failures: selecting the wrong procedure and never being able to select an installed one. The resulting maintenance target is the route from a request to working capability.

Key takeaways · AI-distilled

Fix filing at the policy layer, not skill by skill. One shared filing-rules document plus a two-line mandate at the top of every writing skill — read the routing file first, file by primary subject, not by source format or skill name — repaired ten skills at once.
Catalog the confusion pairs explicitly: raw data dumps versus originals, a person who is also a company, policy analysis versus source material. Documenting each known mistake stops it recurring by a slightly different route.
The symptom of an overstuffed instructions file is not an error, it is degradation: slower and less precise responses as spreads thin. The tell here was Claude Code itself asking for the file to be cut back.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
agent harness — The scaffolding around a model that turns it into a working agent — the loop, the tools it can call, and the rules for when to stop.
agent skill — A reusable instruction file that teaches an agent how to do one job well — the procedure, the tools, and what counts as done.
attention — The mechanism that lets a model weigh which earlier words matter for the word it's currently processing — the core operation of a transformer.

Key quotes

“You can't make someone smarter by shouting louder. You make them smarter by giving them the right book at the right moment.”

“That's when you know you've gone too far — the AI is telling you to stop talking.”

“A resolver is a routing table for context. When task type X appears, load document Y first.”

“Only 3 out of 13 referenced the resolver.”

Read the source x.com