Work order

Vague prose handoffs are the most common way multi-agent systems produce confident, useless work. A team that does not know what "done" means will pick a definition, and it will be the one that is easiest to reach.

Every sys_session_send that assigns work carries a work order. Use templates/work-order.md.

Required fields

Goal — one sentence. What changes in the product, not what files get edited.

Acceptance criteria — a checklist, each item independently verifiable, each naming how it will be verified. "Conflicts are detected" is not a criterion. "Given two events overlapping by >=1 minute in the same domain, the conflict list contains both, verified by pytest tests/test_conflicts.py -q" is.

If the criteria were derived rather than given by the PM, say so and point at the Decision Record where they were written down.

Constraints — what must NOT change. Files out of scope, interfaces that are frozen, performance or compatibility budgets, style conventions to follow.

Interfaces to respect — the contracts this work sits behind: the UX interface contract, an API shape, a schema. Name the file, not the concept.

Definition of done — what returns. A PR number, a tag, a findings file, a document. Name the artifact.

Titles

Set title on the dispatch to the WORK, never the vendor or harness.

• Good: conflict-detection-api, review-briefing-privacy, explore-sync-flake
• Bad: codex, claude_code, worker, agent-2

The title is what the PM sees in the session list. A list of vendor names tells them nothing about what is running.

A title is also a continuation key. sys_session_send does spawn-or-continue on it: reuse a title and you continue that conversation rather than starting a new one. A title must therefore be unique to one task and one recipient, and reused only to deliberately continue that exact conversation.

Two dispatches sharing a title — or a title recycled from earlier in the run — can bind a session to the wrong conversation entirely. That has happened here: a dispatched design brief came back carrying a byte-identical copy of an earlier liveness probe, and the agent answered the probe faithfully while the real question was never asked. See docs/incidents/11.

Put the work order's ID in the title (WO-0007-conflict-api) so uniqueness is structural rather than a naming habit. And validate the return: a work order that comes back without addressing its own acceptance criteria was misbound, not failed — re-dispatch on a fresh title rather than treating it as a bad delivery.

Scope discipline

One work order, one scoped task. If a work order needs three unrelated things, it is three work orders. Teams that receive bundled scope return bundled evidence, and bundled evidence cannot be checked.