When the first week of the company ended (the company gets a wardrobe), the next problem was housekeeping: many agents working in parallel, each leaving something behind.
the branches nobody owned
Every agent works in a branch, and finishes there. A sweep found sixteen leftover branches, fifteen of them holding nothing that was not already merged. Two pull requests had conflicted because two threads had added rows to the same table on the same day. Selim’s answer was not one more cleanup but a role: “we need somebody to just do this work, to take a look at our repositories and keep them clean and up to date.”
The repo keeper’s first full sweep across six repositories found that 321 of 332 branches were already in the main line: merged pull requests whose branches GitHub never deleted. The first count had said hundreds held unmerged work, but the clones were shallow, and unshallowing turned 160 of them into merged. The best proof on repositories that squash was simple: is the branch’s tip the head of a merged pull request? One “conflict” was a finding already in main in another place, so the merge was undone. A cloud session cannot delete branches, so the deletion script went to Selim, with the steps to turn on GitHub’s automatic deletion. The role fixes the source, a setting, and not only the mess.
an editor for the design
Cube design is the base every other agent builds on, and 180 contribution rows were still new on the day. Selim: “I want to put something between me and this specification that is going to do all that work for me.” He asked what the industry calls that and offered product owner. The answer was the spec editor of the web standards groups: a product owner orders a backlog, but here the text itself is the product. Once a day the editor sorts what challenges cube design into five answers (answered, a gap, a clash, elsewhere, a new look), drafts proposals but never decides, and rings Selim with at most three asks a run. “To not accumulate open questions … so I could tackle them one by one.”
a craft beside the teams
A study proposed a testing team. Selim’s observation was about grouping: “when we have a testing role, that is not going to belong only to the testing team … we are grouping the teams in a different way.” “Team” had been used for two things, a product and a craft, and a tester is one piece seen three ways: a role, in a craft team, worn in a product team. No side is the master. The made-up person in a test is a costume for one run, not a role. Nothing existing was restructured: a test lead, a facilitator and a conformance reviewer were hired.
one place for everything
Another thread was refreshing the installed skills when Selim stopped it: “otherwise we are going to have two different places and two different copies, and things will fall out of order.” Then he went further: move that too, “instead of having them scattered all around.” Five skills became one. The to-do, journal and usage skills were folded into the company’s own pages, and cube design’s skill moved from its repository into the company. A line-by-line check of the old skills repository found the morning’s move faithful, with only descriptions differing, and two skills missing, which were copied over. A second, older copy of one of them was found in cube design, the kind of quiet drift the retirement is meant to end. The repository is cleared for archiving.
the assistant breaks, and the door changes
The assistant’s scheduled pass had stopped after the move. Earlier guesses blamed missing connectors; the run’s own transcript showed it was the repository: a fresh session could not clone the private company repo. A session cannot attach a repository to a task, nor edit a task made through the API, so the fix needed Selim’s hands. Thirteen waiting to-dos were sorted by hand meanwhile. The assistant also took its first step up the trust ladder: after sorting, it may take up to two to-dos a run that Selim has said yes to.
That led to the day’s biggest rule. Ten asks from the same day sat in nobody’s hands, two already answered in their sessions. Selim: “it is not quick communication enough. It is a bit too slow for our speed … that session is just going to wait and wait.” The old rule made a to-do the way to reach him. The new one separates the doorbell from the list: a session he is in asks him right there; a run he is away from puts the ask first in its summary, so his phone gets it, and adds the to-do; Todarch keeps only what must wait. The assistant is no longer the gate.
A smaller fix came with it: the connector’s list of to-dos returned every to-do whole, fifty of them too long for a session to read. A tool that answers more than an agent can read is a door that is shut, so it now answers short by default, and a push about a to-do opens that to-do.