How the work moves now.
On the seventeenth of September I marked a hundred and fifty-two lines as discarded. Each line was one run of some piece of machinery, waiting for me to say whether I had kept what it produced. I had not said, and the ledger called those runs owed. Three days earlier I had changed the rule. A run I have not judged gets no line and owes nothing. So I swept them all at once.
That is a small change and it is most of how the third repository works. The system keeps the records and I make the judgments. A record does not get to stand in for a judgment I never made.
Machinery is my word for anything in the repository that does work on my behalf and could quietly stop being worth its complexity. A prompt, an agent, a small tool. Each piece sits on a ladder with five rungs. Noticed means the same gap showed up three real times, and an idea does not count. Role means a prompt file exists for it, and that costs one file. Validated means I kept the output of a run that did the whole job. Agent means it has a name the system can call and a fixed list of tools. Called means it got reached for by name and unprompted, on work it was not built for.
Two pieces climbed the whole ladder, and on the fourteenth of September I froze it. The same day I retired five roles. One boiled a pile of open decisions down, and now the decisions get ruled live. One ranked what mattered, and now the session does that itself. One of them stood in for asking me. I am present in every session, so the system can just ask me.
Four agents are left that I wrote. One reads memory before design work starts, and nothing that writes is on its tool list. I did not want to trust it to hold back. I wanted it to be unable. One builds. It takes a single stalled item and ends with a file on disk and the receipts under it, and if it ends by telling me what I should do, the run failed. One reviews code, and it has to run things, because its verdict keeps a confirmed result apart from one it only read. One reviews documents. I still have not measured how often it flags something that is fine.
Two named chains tie them together. The first is the grill. When decisions pile up I ask to be grilled, and the session puts them to me one at a time, as a question with two to four options. The recommended option comes first, and every option says what it would cost. What it would delete, what it would push, whether it merges. It checks the facts behind a question before asking it, so what reaches me is intent. If I get interrupted, the question counts as unanswered. A small ruling gets carried out before the next question comes.
A ruling that calls for a build opens the second chain, the lane. One item, one branch, and a written work order with a scope and a way to tell whether it worked. The builder commits only what the order named. Then the session checks the builder's report against the actual files. For a change in behaviour it has to show the test failing before the change and passing after. The commit gets frozen, and a reviewer who did not write it reads it. Code goes to one reviewer and prose to the other. Five rounds of review, and then the problem comes back to me.
Landing is split. If the change touches none of the files that govern the system itself, the session merges it after a clean review. If it touches one of them, the merge is mine. And whether the run was any good goes into the ledger only on my word, with the reviewer's own sentence copied in exactly.
Neither chain gives permission for anything. Every step in them is gated the same way it would be if the file that describes the chain did not exist. Neither one runs on a schedule. The second repository ran on its own, and I had to steer it by hand through paths I had laid myself. These two chains only move when I am in the room.
Some of it is still only words. The builder's scope is a sentence in a work order, and the builder has a shell, so a careless run could walk straight past it. The builder has also never been reached for unprompted. I always send it. And all of this was designed by a person who sits in every session. I do not know yet what it looks like on a week when I do not.