What is task dependency analysis?

Task dependency analysis is a concept in personal epistemology: Draw the dependencies between your agents to see the full coordination picture.

Example: You run a morning system with several cognitive agents: a journaling agent that clarifies your priorities, a planning agent that sequences your day, a deep-work agent that executes the first priority, and a communication agent that handles messages. You assume these run independently. But when you skip journaling, the planning agent produces a vague schedule, the deep-work agent starts on the wrong task, and the communication agent sends half-formed responses because you never identified what matters today. The failure is not in any single agent. It is in the invisible dependency chain: planning depends on journaling's output, deep work depends on planning's output, and communication quality depends on all three. Until you draw those dependencies, every disruption cascades invisibly. Once you draw them, you see exactly where every failure will propagate — and where to intervene.

This concept is part of Phase 26 (Multi-Agent Coordination) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for multi-agent coordination.