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.

Compose the Active Team

Activate the responsibilities the next task decision needs. Add specialty requirements through references/specialists.md; a profile on the bench needs no worker or monitoring loop. One worker holds one assignment in a dispatch. Compatible expertise may share a responsibility. Consultations with the same canonical responsibility use separate dispatches, each with its own engagement.

The owner planner applies capability and contribution eligibility before affordable task familiarity and measured headroom. Step 5 in the skill names the executable contract. Use measured costs to improve calibration; preserve the pinned judge and the developer's early-fix reservation.

If no eligible worker fits, record the gap and staff or sequence the work. Never silently drop a required responsibility or let a contributor independently verify its own work. Specialist advice does not replace required reviewer and tester passes.

Two Phases

An implementation task runs through the round twice, and only the second pass gates release. Investigation-only tasks use Step 12's knowledge-deliverable gate; they do not require a pushed branch or release reports.

Phase 1 — pre-development (optional). An architect or advisor supplies the needed design or interaction report. An investigator may first resolve a causal question. Assess each consultation before using its outcome. The tester maps each acceptance criterion to a test, or delivers those tests as a patch (tester Mode A or B). Plan that work with --round tester=test_plan and record its actual contribution through assess-specialist before selecting Phase 2 verifiers. A test patch author is an implementation contributor, even while holding the tester role. 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 excludes actual design and implementation contributors from reviewer and tester. The owner applies recorded contribution history; use --exclude for relevant contributions outside it. Assess uncertain prior consultations under references/specialists.md. The reviewer responsibility is verification only; it no longer carries pre-development Mode A. Historical reviewer responsibility remains unknown until its actual contribution is established.

Consultations can enter later when a new question could change implementation or verification. Scope any resulting correction through the accepted behavior and existing correction allowance; a specialist recommendation grants no new implementation authority. A completed consultation returns to the next needed assignment, or closes an investigation-only knowledge deliverable through Step 12.

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 assigns the requested responsibilities with specialty requirements and explicit contribution exclusions where needed. It contacts nobody; owner state migration may save an older ledger.
5. Package — Step 6 builds a range-specific VCS artifact for reviewer and tester briefs. Keep the original task base for full reviews and the prior reviewed tip for scoped re-checks; a new tip gets a new package.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Dispatch — teamlead.sh apply uses Step 10's explicit context mode, then sends the assignment prompt. The recovery reference governs developer fix retention and the separate assessed specialist continuation path. It re-reads live status and refuses to type into a busy worker.
9. Observe — supervision-watch observes every enrolled worker. Verify candidates with wait-report.sh --once, ledger outcomes, and acknowledge handled events under references/supervision.md.
10. Gate — the lead reads every report in full and decides: another round, or the release hand-off.

Before relying on consultation output, save the report delivery receipt and run assess-specialist under references/specialists.md. Record the accepted outcome in the task ledger and resolve its supervision obligations separately. Keep useful sessions available for likely follow-up, while preserving scoped lessons outside the session. No idle specialist counts as active work.

The lead appends decisions throughout this flow to the persistent task ledger, including before pauses and handoffs. references/task-ledger.md separates dispatch and report observations from assignment acceptance and task completion. All references to the round log here mean that ledger.

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 — take Step 12's bounded fix path under rules/agent-team-operation.md Fix Loops. Keep a stable task identifier and advance its fix counter; changing worker or scope never restarts it. Name the findings and prior report in each brief. Re-check the findings with scoped briefs, then run full verification before release.
• 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 --once exit 1 — delivery remains pending. Record the checkpoint, acknowledge its event with a scheduled pending recheck, and resume the fleet watcher. Never send a second copy of the brief on a status hint.
• Persist blocked dialogs, missing reports, and required operator decisions in the attention queue before presenting them. Keep observing unrelated work. A pause or handoff must cover the entire active fleet under the supervision reference; a single worker's blocker does not release those obligations.

Release Gate

For an authorized implementation release, Step 12 requires all four:

1. The developer's report names the branch and the commit SHA it pushed.
2. A broad reviewer Mode B report reviews that same SHA and carries no blocking finding.
3. A broad tester Mode C report verifies that same SHA, with the repo's gates run and every acceptance criterion met.
4. Nothing has been pushed to the branch after those two reports.

A Phase 1 design note or test plan does not satisfy 2 or 3. A report against an older SHA does not either: re-run Phase 2 against the current tip. After scoped re-checks close the findings, re-run Phase 2 with full briefs before handing off to release. Scoped reports alone never satisfy this gate.

Reassess both passes against current contribution history before releasing. A later discovery that a verifier shaped the task's design or implementation invalidates its independence, even when the reviewed SHA is unchanged. Preserve the historical receipt, append the new gate decision and its evidence to the task ledger, and obtain a fresh independent report. Never rewrite the prior review or treat an old approval as authority over newer contribution evidence.

Blocking Gate

At Step 12, apply skills/herdr-teamlead/references/assignment-reasoning.md to the findings and their proposed corrections. Preserve required judge rulings and operator decisions; scope classification never waives a blocking finding. Read this task's confirmed fix history, name the next fix number, and return to Step 4 with self-contained briefs carrying the findings and prior reports. Preserve the developer for retained fixes; use a fresh context for the fresh-worker stage. Never reset the counter during re-planning. At an exhausted allowance, a contested verdict, or a lead override, go to Step 13 first. Use the recorded bounded plan for authorized extra attempts; collect each preceding attempt's actual blocking review before continuing.

Branch-Changing Ruling

At Step 19, the lead never edits the branch itself. At an exhausted allowance, record the checkpoint and concrete correction proposal through the owner commands in skills/herdr-teamlead/references/dispatch-recovery.md. Report implementation as waiting_for_operator while the bounded decision is pending; finish the skill until it arrives. Record an explicit approval once and continue within it. Otherwise return to Step 12 carrying ACTION: verbatim as required work. Count that implementation as the next fix, under the same task identifier, and gate the resulting tip again before release.

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.

The Judge

A reserved seat outside ordinary staffing, on the most capable model available. It holds no other responsibility. rules/agent-team-operation.md Judge Seat is the contract; this section is the operational detail for Steps 13–19 of skills/herdr-teamlead/SKILL.md.

Dispatch it on exactly one of four triggers:

• A contested reviewer or tester verdict — one worker's finding, another worker's (or the lead's) disagreement, neither side able to settle it by re-reading the rule.
• A lead override of a blocking finding — the lead about to waive a finding a worker labelled blocking gets a second, independent read first.
• A fix loop exhausted its allowance with blocking work remaining — the judge rules before another correction proposal. Step 19 records the checkpoint and waits for an explicit bounded plan. An approved plan covers multiple attempts within its recorded bounds; fresh release handoffs do not ask for context-change permission. See references/dispatch-recovery.md.
• A bot finding the team disagrees with — the policy reviewer or Copilot flags something the developer and reviewer both think is wrong.

It is read-only without exception: no file edit, no mutating git or gh command, no GitHub post, no subagent dispatch. It reads both positions and the governing rule, verifies the disputed facts against the tree itself rather than trusting either side's framing, and returns a report opening with three lines — RULING: uphold A | uphold B | amend — <line> | blocked — <question>, ACTION: naming the minimal step, UNVERIFIED: naming anything it could not check — followed by its numbered reasons.

blocked is the judge declining to rule on a dispute it cannot settle from the tree and the rule text alone. The round stops there and the named question goes to the operator. The lead does not dispatch a second judge and does not rule in its place.

The ruling binds the round the moment the lead reads it. Only the operator overrides one; record the override and why in the round log.

The judge worker is declared in the main config.json and is measured and planned like every other seat, but its seat is pinned rather than ranked: the judge block names the agent, model and effort, the planner never chooses who judges, and the pinned worker never holds another seat.

It runs on the same Claude subscription as the claude worker, so both declare the same window_group and the planner charges a seat's cost against every worker sharing that window. When that window is exhausted the round halts: there is no substitute judge, no fallback to another vendor's flagship, and no degraded ruling.

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 Herdr status as assignment acceptance or task completion.
• Merge on a worker's behalf. The developer runs the release skill.
• Act against a judge's ruling, or seat the judge on developer, reviewer, or tester. Only the operator overrides a ruling.

Dispatch Results

Step 10 of skills/herdr-teamlead/SKILL.md follows these outcomes. Before a finish, apply the whole-fleet pause/handoff contract in references/supervision.md.

• Exit 0 — proceed to Step 11.
• Busy target — no dispatch occurred. Wait for readiness or replan; stay at this step.
• Sent but not started — inspect the pane; never re-dispatch on top of the message. Proceed to Step 11 for the roles that started.
• Retrospective, clear, composer, tier, qualification, or continuity refusal — follow the diagnostic and recorded dispatch outcome. Reconcile uncertainty before retrying; wait for roles whose records confirm dispatch.
• Unknown refusal — report it verbatim and finish here.
• --dry-run — inspect the context choice, requested tier, and relaunch argv. It contacts no worker, writes no ledger, and proves no live tier or qualification. Finish here.

Ruling Outcomes

Step 19 follows these branches. Before a finish, preserve any user question and apply the whole-fleet pause/handoff contract in references/supervision.md.

The RULING: line binds the round. Only the operator overrides it.

For an investigation-only task, a non-blocked ruling returns to Step 12's knowledge-deliverable gate with the ruling and any required authorized research. Apply the existing correction allowance and judge rules to remaining findings. Do not enter implementation Phase 2 or Step 20 without implementation/release authorization. A blocked ruling follows the operator-question path below.

• uphold A / uphold B / amend, ACTION: changing no branch content — record the ruling. Proceed to Step 20 only with Step 12's broad reports against the current tip. Otherwise re-run Phase 2 with full briefs carrying the ruling. Do not re-dispatch the judge for the same settled dispute.
• uphold A / uphold B / amend, ACTION: changing the branch — apply the round-flow reference's Branch-Changing Ruling contract. Finish here while its required operator decision is pending; otherwise return to Step 12 with ACTION: as the next counted fix.
• blocked — the judge declined to rule. Stop the round and put its named question to the operator. Do not dispatch a second judge and do not rule in its place. Finish here.