Done Is a Checklist, Not a Clock
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The briefs my fleet is handed carry an acceptance block, and nine of them open it with the same three sentences: “Done = ALL boxes checked. Each independently checkable. Scope, not time.” Below that, the boxes. The command exists and is wired. The command audit passes. The self-check passes. An agent runs until every box is ticked and then exits clean, and nothing else in the brief says when.
The rule behind that line was written on a Monday at the end of June, the twenty-sixth decision in the loop’s constitution. Work is bounded by scope, explicit done-criteria, never by time. Banned, when assigning, planning or proposing work: time-boxes, “by” a date, “spend N hours”, and the whole afternoon, this-week and “quick” family of estimates. One carve-out, so the rule did not eat the loop’s own ruler: measuring value as time reclaimed stays, the time log stays, the maintenance-hours cost field stays, and sizing a task small, medium or large stays, because a size is a scope. Only the clock as a gate on the work is gone.
The reasoning in the decision is one sentence with three clauses, and all of it is about what a clock does to the work inside it. A time-box invites padding to fill the box. An estimate rewards the plausible number over the real completion. A deadline forces a context switch on the schedule’s terms instead of when the thing is done. None of those is a complaint about people. They are what any worker does, human or otherwise, when the brief says two hours and the task says otherwise, and an agent will fill two hours as faithfully as anyone.
The same commit that wrote the rule rewrote the fleet’s prompt into its charter, and the charter’s version is blunt: “Finish the feature. One feature, built fully, committed, tree clean, then exit.” Finished is the acceptance block. It is the only place a brief is allowed to say what done means, and it has to say it in boxes a stranger could tick.
The scope gate: work is scoped by value and by done-criteria, never by time or effort. A brief names what finished looks like and the agent runs until it does; a clock may measure the work afterwards, but it may not end it.