Confirm This Mode in One Line
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The launcher that sends one background agent at one repository carries a comment with a question in it: "Why repo untouched?" was a real incident. That is the whole record. An agent went out with a task, worked for a while, reported back, and the repository it was sent to had not changed. It had investigated. It had produced a plan. Nobody had told it that planning was not the job, and nobody had told it that it was, so it guessed, and it guessed the cheaper phase.
A dispatch here has two parts. The first is the ISA, the ideal state artifact: a scope contract written before the agent exists, with a current_state section that names the gap as it is (files, the missing capability, the manual chore), an ideal_state paragraph describing the world once the work is done, and an acceptance block of checkboxes, each one independently checkable, which is the definition of done. Scope, never time: there is no deadline in an ISA, only signals that either hold or do not. An agent runs against that block, and when the run goes wrong the correction is never a message to the running agent. It is an edit to the ISA and a fresh dispatch.
The second part came after the untouched repository, out of a review of what sessions kept getting wrong. Every dispatch prompt now opens with one line before anything else: MODE: EXECUTE-AND-PUSH or MODE: PLAN-ONLY. The first expands to implement, test, commit and push in this session, do not stop at a proposal. The second expands to investigate and answer, do not modify the repository. Both end with the same instruction: confirm this mode in one line before starting. The launcher injects the execute line by default, a --plan flag swaps in the other, and a task that already carries its own MODE line passes through untouched. Briefs written by hand state it by hand.
The confirmation is the part that earns its keep. An agent that writes “MODE: EXECUTE-AND-PUSH confirmed” as its first line has committed to a phase in writing before it has read the task, and an agent that cannot bring itself to write that line has told you something before it has cost you anything. The question in the launcher comment was asked after the fact. The mode line moves it to the front.
The ISA: the scope contract a planner hands a builder, whose acceptance checklist is the definition of done. It opens with a MODE line, EXECUTE-AND-PUSH or PLAN-ONLY, which the agent confirms in one line before it starts, so that the phase is never the agent’s guess.