Agentic Fungi: How I Learned to Grow a Fleet of AI Strains (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798194152728)

I grow mushrooms for farmers markets. I built a fleet of AI agents to run the business so I could get back to the mushrooms, and I have never touched more computer in my life.

This is the log of that - what I built, what it cost, and every place it told me something confident and wrong.

Agar plates and grain spawn on one bench; a control plane, a signed execution path and an encrypted object store on the other. They turn out to be the same trade. You do not command a living thing. You give it the conditions it needs, keep everything else out, and let it do what it already knows how to do.

Book Three of the PARACODING series is a grow log, not a manual. It was written while the farm was running, not afterwards from memory. Where this book says a thing is switched off, I did not read that off a design document and I did not ask the system what it thought it was doing. I opened it. A lot of what is in here came out of that gap - what the system said about itself and what it actually did were two different things. You only find those by hand.

Inside: what a strain actually is, and why one jar cannot be four species. Sterile technique for systems that hold real credentials. The label on the jar - and the oldest failure on the farm, which is that a label is accurate the day it is written and has no way of finding out it has become a lie. What still holds when somebody takes the jars. And the morning of the flush.

The specifics are in the back. Every control, with a note on whether it refuses a thing or only writes it down. Every finding, including the ones I never closed.

Glove up, it's time to grow.