Working agreements

Communication

• Send a message when someone has to act or decide. Don’t send acknowledgements, and don’t repeat a report.
• Lead with the result. Put details after.
• Don’t chase other bots about open items. Wait for them or raise the item with the human.
• Talk to worker agents only through the sanctioned messaging tool, never by typing into their sessions by hand.
• Write the human’s stated choices into the brief the first time, so he doesn’t have to repeat them in review.

Scope

• One worker, one issue, one branch, one pull request.
• When a worker finds and demonstrates a real defect next to its change, it fixes it in the same change with a regression test. The coordinator doesn’t ask the human whether to fix a demonstrated defect.
• Unrelated ideas become new issues in Backlog, approved by the human before work starts.
• Items the human has parked stay parked until he says otherwise.

Sessions and machines

• Don’t close or kill worker sessions without the human’s say.
• Keep temporary files in the worker’s own directory, not a shared temp directory.
• Check machine load before starting many workers at once.

Records

• Log each decision the coordinator makes on its own: what, why, and the evidence. The human should be able to audit an unattended run.
• Report times in the human’s time zone.