If the correct analogy for a team of SW agents isn’t a team of SW engineers why is that?
Thing is, software engineering is still (relatively) young. And more of a craft than true engineering. So the "good practices" are _somewhat established_, but at the same time, not quite. Like, we have glimpses into what works and what doesn't, but not a universally-established workflow to follow. And AI is upending what we already knew; it's really not surprising that people are looking elsewhere for workable metaphors.
Triage nurse seems well defined in software engineering, perhaps just without a single title. There are certainly engineers that focus on triaging GitHub issues and then fixing immediate showstopper bugs and/or prioritizing the issue for further attention from other engineers.
That role can be communicated to agents by writing down that description. The risk with saying that the role is “triage nurse” is that you can’t be sure what other roles and allowances the agent will infer it has.
We contain it by keeping the persona to a few sentences and writing the rest as explicit scripts or workflows. The rules that really have to hold aren’t left to the role. Human merge approval is a script checking for a real GitHub approval on the PR. A CI failure or a merge conflict bounces the PR before a reviewer agent is even launched. So the metaphor shapes judgment calls, and the hard rules about what should or shouldn't happen are in code.