Plan 0017
One delegation contract for agents
One contract for handing work to another agent: identity (which session, which worktree), state (live, stalled, done, with evidence), and lifecycle (started, progress, terminal signal, no silent stops). Overseer dispatch, background agents, and bg sessions converge on it.
- Status
- Sketch
- Ambition
- 6 one dispatch primitive across overseer, background agents, and bg sessions
- Impact
- 7 fifty issues of stale dispatches, lost lifecycle signals, and blind handoffs
- Effort
- 7 session identity, state visibility, and lifecycle signaling across runtimes
- Risk
- 5 delegation bugs waste fleets quietly; migration must not add a new silent path
- Maturity
- 2 several dispatch mechanisms exist; none is the contract
- Leverage
- 8 every multi-agent workflow builds on whichever primitive wins
- Taste
- 6 what a dispatch owes its parent is a design judgment, not plumbing
- Authors
andrewgazelka- Created
- Updated
- Tracking issue
- -
- Supersedes
- -
- Superseded by
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Summary
The repo has grown three ways to hand work to another agent (overseer fixers, background claude sessions, kernel-spawned agents) and fifty issues about the same failures in each: dispatches with stale context, agents that stop without a terminal signal, no PID-to-session mapping, parents that cannot tell stalled from working. The fix is not a fourth mechanism; it is one contract the existing three implement: every dispatch carries its context snapshot, every delegate emits a terminal signal, and every parent can ask “alive, and doing what?” and get an evidence-backed answer.
Non-goals
Choosing which orchestrator wins; the contract is orchestrator-neutral by design.
Absorbed issues
#2505, #2422, #2440, #2467, #2470, #2474, #2476, #2498, #2346, #2358, #2363, #2377, #2336, #2328, #2434, #2451, #2351, #2366, #2383, #2692, #2711, #2323, #2317, #2312, #2308, #2306, #2296, #2271, #2268, #2262, #2225, #2212, #2158, #2193, #2201, #2298, #3310, #3289, #3127, #3190, #3221, #3219, #3205, #3194, #2180, #2092, #2008, #2153, #2077, #2178, #2229, #2243, #2300, #2277, #2025
Drafted by Claude Code (Fable) from the open-issue corpus; scores are seed estimates.