The board draining to 280/280 done left the company idle under a
still-active goal, with 24 markdown files and zero code as its life's work.
Two structural gaps caused it: goals had no lifecycle (status was written
once as 'active' and never read again — nothing re-engages anyone when the
last task closes), and nothing anywhere distinguished plans from product,
so every "engineering" objective closed on documents.
The loop, closed:
- tasks.origin (migration 055) records provenance: chat_wake for mention
vehicles (backfilled from their runs), goal_review for checkpoints, null
for real work. Chatter and checkpoints can therefore never count as
progress.
- spawnGoalReviews (each worker tick): an active goal with zero open tasks
and real progress since the last review gets ONE review task for the goal
owner. The review demands evidence — list the workspace, read the code,
run the tests; documents are how work starts, not proof it happened — and
must end in exactly one of: complete_goal, or the next wave of tasks with
requires_filesystem engineering. A review closed with neither spawns
nothing: termination is structural, not a counter.
- complete_goal (CEO or goal owner) finally lets someone say a goal is
achieved, audited.
- CEO and department-head voices now state the doctrine: a goal that
promises software closes on code that builds and passes tests in the
workspace, and implementation is delegated with requires_filesystem: true.
On the live profile this arms one review: the active platform goal has 0
open tasks and 21 real completed ones, so the CEO gets the checkpoint on
next launch and the company starts building instead of stopping.
Every "engineering" deliverable the company ever produced was a markdown
skeleton, because documentation was the ceiling of the toolset:
write_deliverable and create_document were the only artifact tools. An
engineer could not see the files that exist, read a line of code, or run a
single command — and create_task hardcoded requires_filesystem to false, so
the entire approval-gated read_write mount plumbing was dead code.
New workspace capability (agent-workspace-tools.ts):
- list_files / read_file: explore the bound workspace, traversal-guarded by
the same resolveWorkspacePath used for writes, size- and count-capped.
- run_command: real shell execution with the workspace as cwd, 120s timeout,
16k output cap. Gated on the task's approved filesystem grant — the same
requires_filesystem flag that flips the mount to read_write and routes the
task through operator approval (auto-approved only in AI-CEO mode, which
is that mode's explicit contract).
- create_task now takes requires_filesystem, so the CEO and officers can
delegate engineering work that is allowed to change code and run tests.
- Prompts brief every agent on the tools, and filesystem tasks state the
bar directly: real output is code that builds and tests that pass — a
document describing the work does not close an engineering task.
Tests: tool registry, dependency-folder-skipping listing, traversal refusal,
the run_command access gate plus exit-code reporting, and the create_task
approval path for filesystem work.
The two real goal tasks from July 9 each got exactly one session: the run
completed, the agent never moved the task off backlog, and the heartbeat's
"has a completed run" exclusion locked them out forever. The agents could
not have closed them anyway — update_task_status requires a task_id the
prompt never carried.
The progress contract, made explicit end to end:
- The task prompt now carries "Task id: ..." and tells the agent exactly how
to end a session: done via update_task_status when the work is complete,
in_progress with a note on what remains when it is not.
- The heartbeat re-enqueues any open task with no run in flight — a
completed run that left its task open earns a follow-up session, with the
prompt stating how many prior sessions were spent so the agent continues
instead of redoing work. The retry budget (3 non-transient runs) still
bounds every task; a task that spends it parks with one log line naming it.
- Scripted agents in the integration suites now close their tasks the way
the contract expects real ones to.
Researched how OKR-run companies cascade (company objective -> C-suite
officers per function -> department objectives -> individual key
results) and encoded that shape into how the CEO builds the org.
- hire_agent gains seniority (director/lead/staff; c_suite stays
reserved for the CEO's privileges) and a business-card title, so the
CEO hires a CTO/CFO/CMO as directors instead of a flat pool of ICs
- CEO persona + goal kickoff now direct the OKR cascade: hire 2-4
officers, hand each a department objective, let them build teams;
department heads get their own doctrine (hire leads/staff, cascade
key results as tasks, report up)
- Migration 050 adds Finance and Sales to every org's canonical
departments (backfilled for existing DBs) so a real C-suite has
somewhere to hire
- Org chart viewport is a fixed-height scroll region: zooming rescales
the diagram inside it instead of resizing the card
- Unit test drives a live three-level chain: CEO -> CTO (director) ->
Engineering Manager (lead) -> staff, with rank/title persisted
Skills no longer come from the user's ~/.agents library - most users have
none, and the CEO branch that compiled the entire catalogue into its
prompt overflowed the model context (1.1MB) and failed every CEO run.
- Bundle "built-in skills/" with the app (extraResources) and stage it
at startup into <profile>/builtin-skills as one dir-per-skill copy -
both bundle shapes (SKILL.md dirs and flat category .md files)
normalize into the same importable layout
- Import the staged catalogue per org at startup and inside onboarding,
so the CEO's first run already carries it
- Forced house style: resolveRuntimeSnapshot unions the humanizer skill
into every agent's runtime (CEO included) as a resolution rule - no
binding row to forget, delete, or bypass; revoke_skill refuses it
- CEO staffs hires with skills: hire_agent accepts a skills array,
grant_skill/revoke_skill adjust later, list_skills now shows
descriptions from skill frontmatter
- Kill the c_suite compile-all branch; everyone resolves bindings-only,
capped at 200k chars with omissions named in the prompt
- Remove the Skills settings page and its import/sync/test IPC surface;
drop ~/.agents discovery and the AGENTCOMPANY_NEW_SKILLS_ROOT seam in
favor of AGENTCOMPANY_NEW_BUILTIN_SKILLS_DIR
- Tests: staging/import/forced-resolution/cap units, real-bundle CI
check, e2e asserts the tab is gone and the catalogue self-imports
The legacy application - its src, tests, landing site, promo assets, docs,
release tooling, CI workflows, and root configs - leaves the tree; it stays
reachable in history. Everything under AgentCompany-New moves up unchanged:
same package name, so the production userData/database path is untouched,
and e2e/build scripts already resolved paths relative to the project. The
developer cred.txt stays gitignored at its new location. Full verify:ci
passes from the new root.
ZacharyZhang-NY