How do I practice lifecycle awareness?

The most direct way to practice lifecycle awareness is through a focused exercise: List every active agent in your cognitive infrastructure. For each one, assign a lifecycle stage: genesis (just created, untested), deployment (actively being calibrated), maturity (running reliably, minimal intervention), or decline (losing relevance, producing diminishing returns). Count how many fall in each stage. Then ask: does my actual attention allocation match this distribution? Where am I over-maintaining a mature agent? Where am I neglecting one still in deployment?

Common pitfall: Treating all agents as if they need equal attention regardless of stage. Mature agents get fussed over when they should be left alone. Fragile new agents get ignored because older ones feel more important. The portfolio degrades not from any single agent failing, but from attention being allocated without awareness of where each agent actually is.

This practice connects to Phase 30 (Agent Lifecycle) — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.