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The factory running · 03

Actors and runners

Who acts at each stage — and why no product name appears in the answer.

StageActor
Grilling, wayfinder, to-spec, to-ticketshuman in the loop
Triage, implement (evidence included)agent session
Shipagent session under explicit delegation
Human reviewthe human gate

Runners are interchangeable

The unit of AFK work is the agent session: one fresh context window working one ticket from its ready draft to its evidence. Symphony, the triage cron, or a person's terminal are interchangeable ways of launching one — which is why the process record never names them. A process that depends on a particular orchestrator is a process you cannot replace parts of.

The two runner pages on this site name products because runners are real and worth showing. But notice the direction of the dependency: the runners read the process; the process never reads the runners. Swap the dispatcher tomorrow and every page except its own stays true.

One consequence: board comments and PR descriptions stay contract-voiced no matter which runner launched the session that wrote them. Personality belongs to conversational agents; the tracker gets the same colleague's voice from everyone.