Kitchen Brigade · Lesson 02 of 10
The Station Chart
Lesson 2 of Kitchen Brigade: a crew without structure is a crowd. The three memory tools you've built since First Kitchen — rules, plans, skills — get promoted into a crew handbook that any cook, human or AI, could walk in and follow.
Last lesson you watched fresh eyes beat self-review, and the temptation now is to hire more cooks immediately. Resist it for one more lesson, because of a thing every real chef knows: a brigade without structure is just a crowded kitchen. More hands making the same mess, faster.
What makes a brigade work isn't the cooks — it's the chart on the wall: who owns which station, what the house rules are, what's cooking tonight. And here's the good news you've earned: you already own every piece of that chart. CLAUDE.md, PLAN.md, skills — you built them across First Kitchen and Dinner Service for a kitchen of one. Today they get promoted to serve a crew — because subagents read the same handbook.
What you'll plate today
A crew-ready handbook: rules any cook must follow, a plan that says who owns what, skills written so a stranger could run them — proven by the strictest test there is: a fresh subagent following them cold.
Ingredients
- A project you'll use for this whole course — a new
kitchen-brigadefolder, or your Prep Station kitchen if you cooked that course (it's perfect brigade territory) - About 30 minutes
Cook
1. The audit — read your handbook as a stranger
Read this project's CLAUDE.md, plans, and skills as if you were a
brand-new cook on your first shift — no shared history with me.
List every place the handbook ASSUMES context a stranger wouldn't
have: rules that say "the usual way," steps that skip "the obvious
part," names that mean nothing cold. Don't fix — list.
The list stings a little. "Follow my style" — whose style, says the new cook. Handbooks written for a kitchen of one lean on the thousand things you and your agent worked out in conversation. Crews don't have that luxury: a subagent starts cold, every time. What made fresh eyes powerful in Lesson 1 — no shared memory — is exactly what makes vague handbooks fail.
2. The promotion — rewrite for cold readers
Fix every item on the list:
1. CLAUDE.md rules: each one self-contained — a cold reader knows
exactly what to do without asking. Keep them short; blunt beats
polite (First Kitchen rule, still law).
2. Skills: each skill must state its INPUTS (what it needs to be
given), STEPS, and DONE-CONDITION (how the cook knows to stop).
3. Add one new file: STATIONS.md — the chart itself. For this
project: what stations exist (review, research, build, check),
and what each station is responsible for. Plain words.
STATIONS.md is the new organ, and it's deliberately boring — a list of jobs and boundaries. Boring is the point. Every multi-agent disaster you'll ever read about is two agents who both thought they owned the same station.
3. The cold-cook test — prove it
Handbooks pass or fail on one test, and you already know its shape from the fire drill:
Send a fresh subagent into this project with ONLY this instruction:
"Read the handbook — CLAUDE.md, STATIONS.md, skills — then run the
[pick one skill] skill on [a real small task]. If anything in the
handbook is unclear or missing, STOP and report what, instead of
improvising."
Show me its output and its complaints, unedited.
The complaints are the grade. A cold cook who finishes the job with zero improvising means your handbook is crew-ready. Complaints mean revision — fix and re-test. (And notice the instruction's last clause: stop instead of improvising. That rule alone prevents half of all crew chaos, and it goes in CLAUDE.md next.)
4. Make stopping a law
Add the crew's first standing law to CLAUDE.md: any cook — you or
a subagent — who hits missing information STOPS and reports, never
improvises around it. And: subagents get their instructions from
the handbook plus their specific order, nothing assumed.
Save point: "the station chart".
When it burns
- The cold cook improvised anyway — instruction phrasing matters: the stop-clause must be in its orders, not just the handbook. Re-run with the clause verbatim. (Lesson 6 makes this automatic.)
- Your skills turned into novels during the rewrite — inputs/steps/done-condition is a skeleton, not an essay prompt: "cut each skill to what a competent cold reader needs — one screen max." Fat handbooks get skimmed; skimming is improvising's front door.
- STATIONS.md feels premature — you only have one agent — correct, and so is a fire drill before a fire. The chart costs ten minutes now; retrofitting structure onto a confused crew costs a weekend. Lessons 4–7 fill these stations fast.
- The audit found nothing — either your handbook is genuinely excellent (Dinner Service graduates: plausible!) or the auditor was gentle. Re-run the audit with "be harsher — assume the new cook is competent but literal-minded."
- You did this on your Prep Station kitchen and worry about breaking it — the handbook edits are save-pointed like everything else, and clearer rules make your existing stations safer, not riskier. This is renovation, not demolition.
Order up
□ The stranger-audit list — and every item fixed
□ Skills carry inputs / steps / done-condition
□ STATIONS.md exists: jobs and boundaries, plain words
□ A cold subagent ran a skill with zero improvising (or its complaints got fixed)
□ The stop-don't-improvise law is in CLAUDE.md
Next up — Lesson 03: New Hands. The chart has empty stations. Before hiring specialists, your kitchen gets new capabilities — MCP, chosen the disciplined way: two additions your actual work demands, and a pantry rule that keeps the shelf lean.
Stuck on a step? Question box below — a step that lost you is a hole in the lesson, not in you.