Twelve discrete steps. Eighty-five percent mechanizable.

The Discovery stage of the Sprint timed every step in the editorial pipeline across a representative production week. Each activity was scored 1–5 on bottleneck severity and tagged for agent candidacy. The audit turned a fuzzy "the workflow is broken" complaint into a specific list of steps to redesign.

What the workflow looked like, in numbers.

The Sprint required a measured baseline before any redesign decisions. Each metric was captured with an explicit measurement method so the post-Sprint comparison would be honest, not aspirational.

The workflow, before and after.

What changed — at a glance.

Publication throughput increased 7× at sprint handoff and has continued to compound. The system now runs 1,000+ agent invocations per week across sixteen production agents (plus one manually-triggered outreach agent), managed by a single operator. 14 reusable patterns have been extracted to the Studio Pattern Library; additional patterns are being formalized from the six agents added post-handoff — including a meta-quality layer (Eval Runner + Quality Monitor) that audits the rest of the system.

▸ Post-handoff signal · 2026-Q2 Compounding outcomes from the 60 days following sprint close: organic traffic +112.5% week-over-week at the first full-week close (S16); category-level lifts of +1,050% on review pages and +1,300% on editorials after the editorial-batch deployment; weekly throughput holding steady at ~34 published posts across noticias, reseñas, editoriales. Six new agents shipped post-handoff: a Daily Competitive Brief (competitor scan that writes coverage-gap drafts directly to production), Structured-Metadata Enrichment (119 posts JSON-LD-classified day one, zero failures), an Eval Runner (rules.json validation on every publish), a Quality Monitor (Sundays 7pm — audits the agent ecosystem itself for drift), a Weekly Performance Dashboard (Sundays 6pm — 11-component GA4/GSC analysis with autonomous metadata PATCHes), and a monthly Comprehensive Site Audit (8-dimension scored Health Report routed to the right executor). The 9-check pre-publish verification protocol and the row-locking endpoint for the Long-Form Editorial Pipeline queue both went live in this window.

Stage by stage.

How the Lighthouse Sprint unfolded for the Indietheka editorial pipeline.

Sixteen agents. One operator above the loop.

The Sprint shipped ten agents at handoff (AGT-01 through AGT-10). The system has continued to compound: six more agents have come online in production, including a meta-quality layer (Eval Runner + Quality Monitor) that audits the rest of the system. Each agent below is named by the pattern of work it performs — the value pattern is the headline, the Indietheka instantiation is the example. Scheduled, observable, reversible. Not a black box.

The build was a trail left by incidents.

The original plan called for a linear three-week deployment (AGT-01/02 in Week 5, AGT-03/04 in Week 6, AGT-05/06 in Week 7). In practice, the system evolved iteratively — each agent's design was shaped by production incidents from its predecessors. The ten additional agents (AGT-07 through AGT-16) were not in the initial scope; they emerged from gaps revealed only after the core pipeline was running live.

The systems beneath the agents.

Not agents themselves, but shared systems the agents depend on. Each one was extracted from a real production constraint, not designed up front.

The category just got a name. The engagement was already inside it.

For most of this case study's history, the only honest way to describe Indietheka was operationally — one editor, sixteen agents, fourteen reusable patterns, eighteen months in production. In May 2026 the market named the category that profile belongs to: Forward Deployed Engineering, the embedded production-AI engagement model that the major foundation labs have begun staffing in Mexico City. Indietheka has been running inside that category — in Spanish, from a CDMX-resident principal, against the exact capability stack the category requires — since Q4 2025. This section maps the capability requirement to the production evidence row by row.

What changed, line by line.

Baseline (Week 1–2 measurement) versus post-Sprint (Week 8 handoff) versus current (production). Every row is a metric the operator and the Studio agreed to before the redesign — none are post-hoc justifications.

How sixteen agents stay above the loop.

Governance isn't a checklist; it's a runtime layer. Every agent reports to a dashboard, every action is reversible, every override is one click. The operator's hands stay on the wheel even when the system is doing the driving.

What compounds — fourteen patterns, every one with a receipt.

The original four patterns were updated with production detail; ten new patterns were extracted from real production incidents during the Sprint and the post-handoff window. Every new pattern carries a traceable incident receipt — the date, the article, the failure that taught us. Documentation standard for each: inputs / outputs, dependencies, governance needs, incident receipt, and adaptation notes for other client contexts.

Updated originals (USP-001 → USP-004)

New patterns (USP-005 → USP-014) — each traceable to a production incident.