Forcing only the opening turn let a weak model take one token action and
stop, so a kickoff hired one agent (or none) and went quiet. Now every turn
is forced (tool_choice required) and the agent ends only by calling the new
`finish` tool — so it must keep hiring, delegating, and messaging until the
work is actually done. Finishing with zero actions, or returning no tool
call at all, fails the run loudly instead of faking success.
Prompts tell each agent it must call a tool every turn and finish only when
done. Tests drive weak-model stubs that act then finish, proving a full team
forms rather than a single gesture.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Audit of the "agents barely communicate / nothing runs" reports: the
bootstrap run, hiring, delegation, channel messages, file handoffs, and
heartbeat continuation are already covered by autonomous-run.test. The one
untested link was the round trip — an @mention actually waking a teammate
who then replies. This test drives a scripted CEO that hires an engineer
and @mentions them in #engineering, asserts the mention created a queued
chat_mention run for that engineer, executes it, and confirms the engineer
replies inside the same thread (two senders, one thread). The orchestration
is sound; real-world silence is a function of the model's tool-use, not the
control plane.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ZacharyZhang-NYandClaude Opus 4.8