Round Flow

The shape of one task round, and what the lead does between the steps of skills/herdr-teamlead/SKILL.md. Read this when a round deviates from the happy path.

The Three Roles

Roles rotate between tasks. The rotation is decided by measured headroom through teamlead.sh plan, never by the lead's impression of who looks fresh. plan breaks a headroom tie on who has held the role fewest times, so nobody owns developer forever.

The weights those three words stand for are named constants — DEFAULT_ROLE_COSTS in skills/herdr-teamlead/teamlead/planner.py — and a role_costs map in config.json re-weighs any of them per install. plan fills the heaviest seat first whatever order --roles names them in, and hands each seat to the eligible worker that leaves the round's smallest projected headroom highest. Re-weigh from measurements: run measure before and after a round and read what the seat actually cost.

Fewer live workers than roles is an error, not a silent drop — a role nobody holds is work nobody is doing. Either name another agent into the roster or fold two roles onto one worker deliberately, in that worker's brief.

Two Phases

A task runs through the round twice, and only the second pass gates anything.

Phase 1 — pre-development (optional). The architect posts a design note on the issue (reviewer Mode A). The tester writes a plan mapping each acceptance criterion to a test, or delivers those tests as a patch (tester Mode A or B). The developer implements against both, runs the repo's gates, pushes the branch, and stops without opening a PR.

Skip Phase 1 for a change small enough that a design note would say less than the diff. Nothing in Phase 1 is a pass; it is preparation.

Phase 2 — post-push verification (mandatory). The reviewer reviews the pushed branch and posts a COMMENT review (Mode B). The tester runs the gates and the acceptance tests against that same branch (Mode C). Both report against the current tip by SHA.

The release hand-off reads Phase 2 reports and nothing else. A design note is not a review of the code that got written, and a test plan is not a test run.

Phase 2 plans with the author barred from the seats that judge its work: plan --exclude reviewer=<author> --exclude tester=<author>. The author keeps whatever seat is left to it — a bar that would strand another role is refused, naming the role and the exclusions, rather than quietly seating somebody to review their own branch.

One Round, End to End

1. Roster — roster.sh names the live workers. An unnamed pane has no dispatch handle; name it first.
2. Authority — verify-authority.sh <owner/repo> answers whether the operator owns the repo. Ownership is the namespace, never write permission, and the answer becomes the authority line in every brief.
3. Measure — teamlead.sh measure reads each worker's own usage numbers. A worker that is working or blocked is skipped with null windows rather than interrupted.
4. Plan — teamlead.sh plan --roles developer,tester,reviewer assigns the roles, with --exclude <role>=<agent> for every seat a worker must not hold. It contacts nobody and writes nothing.
5. Compose — compose-briefs.sh renders the templates from one values file, refusing to write anything when a placeholder is unfilled or a supplied key matches no template. The lead decides the values; the script decides nothing.
6. Provision — provision-worktree.sh creates every worktree the briefs name, from the shared checkout. A worker never runs git there, so its checkout has to exist before the brief arrives.
7. Dispatch — teamlead.sh apply clears each worker's context, then sends the assignment prompt. It re-reads live status first and refuses the round rather than typing into a busy worker.
8. Wait — wait-report.sh <agent> <report-path> per worker, in the order the round needs them.
9. Gate — the lead reads every report in full and decides: another round, or the release hand-off.

Reading a Report

A report is the worker's only channel to the lead. Read all of it, every time — a ## BLOCKED section can sit under a report that otherwise reads as finished.

• Blocking findings present — run another round. Write fresh briefs naming the findings; do not send "see the reviewer's comment" and expect a worker with a cleared context to find it.
• A ## BLOCKED section — the worker stopped on something it could not decide. Resolve it in the NEXT brief, which reaches it through a fresh dispatch. Never type the answer into the worker that is waiting.
• wait-report.sh exit 3 — the worker is at an approval or question dialog. Read the pane, relay the dialog text to the operator verbatim, and stop the round for that worker. The lead never answers it — an approval dialog is input, and input to a blocked agent is exactly what Dispatch Safety forbids. The operator answers; the wait resumes once herdr agent get <name> reports a state other than blocked.
• wait-report.sh exit 1 — the budget ran out. Read the pane before re-dispatching; a worker that is still working needs more budget, not a second copy of the same brief.

Why Phase 2 Runs Before the PR

The registry build's PR #27 went through 12 automated review rounds — policy reviewer plus Copilot — because the code reached the bots before the team's own reviewer and tester had seen it. Each round cost a full CI cycle and a context reload on the developer.

A plain branch push does not trigger the policy reviewer. That gap is the opening: the developer pushes the branch and stops. The tester and the reviewer run against the pushed branch, the developer folds their blocking findings in, and only then does the PR open — so the bots review work the team has already agreed on, and the usual outcome is one round instead of twelve.

The hand-off is therefore split around the bots:

• Developer runs Skill(skill: "release") Steps 1–4 — readiness, PR, version reasoning, and the review request.
• The bots review once.
• Developer runs Steps 5–7 — watch the reviews, act on blocking findings, merge and clean up.

The lead releases nothing until it holds a reviewer Mode B report and a tester Mode C report against the SHA the developer pushed. A newer push invalidates both: re-run Phase 2 against the new tip.

Shared-Account Reviews

The workers share one GitHub account, and GitHub refuses APPROVE and REQUEST_CHANGES on that account's own PR. Internal reviews are posted as COMMENT reviews with each finding labelled blocking or advisory per rules/review-severity.md. The COMMENT state carries no gate, so the LEAD is the gate: a blocking finding in an internal review sends the round back, whatever GitHub's merge box says.

What the Lead Never Does

• Edit the shared checkout. The lead reads it and dispatches; workers write.
• Answer a question by typing into a working worker. Wait for the report.
• Answer a blocked worker's approval dialog. Relay it to the operator and stop.
• Create a worktree for a worker after dispatch. Provision before briefing.
• Write an authority line by hand. It comes from verify-authority.sh.
• Brief a write action on a repo the operator does not own without their explicit per-repo, per-action permission recorded in the brief.
• Release on a Phase 1 report. A plan is not a verification.
• Treat a single idle or done observation as completion.
• Merge on a worker's behalf. The developer runs the release skill.