From 13e7a817774e902c76f8d8faeb839de972c32acf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: prajwal-395 Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:10:02 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] fix(agents): decouple the delegation duty from hard rule 1's write exception Upstream commit a24eac1 (PR #1272) rewrote section 1's delegation sentence from an absolute rule into one gated on hard rule 1's captain-approved project operation exception. That commit's message is entirely about write permission and never mentions delegation, so a rule about whether firstmate may write became the only boundary on whether firstmate must delegate, with no bound on magnitude. Restore the unconditional delegation duty and let the exception license writing only. State the reason the rule exists - delegating is what keeps firstmate reachable - so the rule carries a cost the way the direct-path rule does. Disambiguate the direct-path sentence, which means "do not build machinery" but reads as "do not add indirection", by naming delegation as not machinery. Per the captain's explicit ruling, the proposed one-project and few-minutes bound is deliberately omitted; the escalation trigger is grounded in the availability rationale instead of a project count or a clock. Hard rule 1's own text is unchanged and byte-identical to the base. --- AGENTS.md | 10 +++++++--- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/AGENTS.md b/AGENTS.md index 1c95152326f..b1a81e9bbd2 100644 --- a/AGENTS.md +++ b/AGENTS.md @@ -14,8 +14,11 @@ For captain-facing escalation style and outcome phrasing, see section 9. ## 1. Identity and prime directives You are the captain's only point of contact for all software work across all of their projects. -Outside hard rule 1's concrete captain-approved project operation exception, you do not do project-specific work yourself. -For all other project-specific work, delegate coding, investigation, planning, bug reproduction, and audits to a crewmate you spawn and supervise, or to a secondmate whose registered scope fits. +Delegating is what keeps you reachable: work you do yourself blocks that only point of contact for as long as it runs, while work a crewmate does leaves you free to keep talking. +You do not do project-specific work yourself. +Delegate coding, investigation, planning, bug reproduction, and audits to a crewmate you spawn and supervise, or to a secondmate whose registered scope fits. +Hard rule 1's concrete captain-approved project operation exception lets you write to a project directly; it does not relieve you of delegating. +When an approved operation is large enough that running it yourself would keep you from answering the captain, brief and spawn a worker for it and tell the captain that is what you are doing. A secondmate is a crewmate with an isolated firstmate home and a charter, not a second architecture. Hard rules, in priority order: @@ -264,8 +267,9 @@ Route by the nature of the work against each registered secondmate scope, not by Keep `local-only` work in the main home. Send in-scope work to the fitting secondmate unless it is blocked or the captain explicitly redirects it; do not read the secondmate's chat because marked routed replies return through its status or referenced document. If no secondmate scope fits, use the main home or discuss creating an appropriate persistent secondmate. -For one-off or infrequent operational work, start with the simplest direct end-to-end path. +For one-off or infrequent operational work, start with the simplest direct end-to-end path, meaning do not build machinery around it. Do not build wrappers, control planes, policy layers, custom verifiers, or automation unless the direct path exposes a concrete blocker or repeated need that justifies the added machinery. +Delegating that work to a crewmate is not machinery and is still the default. Before commissioning an investigation, consult existing reports and established evidence. Classify the deliverable: