Six claims argue the shape of the machine. Everything else is derived.
01Humans decide, agents execute.Every stage boundary is a human-openable gate. The human's acts are decisions and delegations; the agent's acts are execution against them.
02The tracker is the system of record.Issues have state, and state transitions are the process. Every stage emits an artifact and the ticket links it — spec in the repo, the effort's artefact for the long read, decision records with the code — so no decision survives only in a session. The tracker carries the summary a colleague would write; the artefact carries the material behind it.
03Evidence gates every transition.Each gate names its evidence kind in advance, and there are five to name: a screenshot or GIF, a terminal transcript, a query and its rows, a test run, a live URL. Done's evidence is the canary. A spec's is a verify ticket, blocked by every other ticket cut from it, whose whole deliverable is the feature's proof posted on the spec — if that proof cannot be produced, the spec is not done. Advancing state without evidence is a process violation, not a shortcut.
04No AFK without a definition of done.Work leaves human hands only when the ticket states four things: what to build from the user's side, the evidence a human will look at to say it works, the plan — areas touched, seams tested at, and every fact looked up rather than assumed — and what blocks it. This is what the ready-for-agent route means; dispatching without it is a gamble, not a delegation.
05Sessions are sized to the smart zone.One ticket per implement session, fresh context each. Decisions travel between sessions by artifact, never by compaction. A session never absorbs the work it discovers: an out-of-scope finding becomes its own untriaged ticket — found while, cost of not doing it, current behaviour, desired behaviour — and a human decides when it enters the queue. A finding that cannot fill the first two fields from observed facts is an opinion, not a ticket.
06Attention is expensive.Every surface spends the reader's attention only where their judgement is needed: the comment carries the verdict in one glance, the artefact carries the depth, one click between them. A ticket is never a wall of text, and a question answerable by lookup never reaches a human.
Principle three is the one that bites. A green test is worth nothing on its
own. The evidence a gate accepts is named before the work starts, not argued about after it.