What is scaffolding for agent creation?

Scaffolding for agent creation is a concept in personal epistemology: Create reusable templates for common agent patterns to accelerate creation of new agents.

Example: A product manager has built dozens of cognitive agents over two years — morning routines, decision frameworks, boundary protocols, review cadences. Each one was created from scratch: she designed the trigger, defined the response, tested the conditions, established the monitoring criteria, and refined the agent through iteration. But she notices a pattern. About half of her agents share the same basic structure: a time-based trigger, a checklist of actions, a completion signal, and a weekly review. The other half share a different structure: an environmental trigger, an if-then decision rule, and an exception handler. Once she extracts these two structures into reusable templates — a 'scheduled routine' template and a 'reactive boundary' template — creating a new agent drops from an hour of design work to ten minutes of filling in specifics. She is not building from scratch anymore. She is instantiating from a pattern.

This concept is part of Phase 30 (Agent Lifecycle) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent lifecycle.