# FLEET.md — the roster, and how it actually runs

> **Status:** descriptive snapshot, not doctrine. This file records how the
> agent fleet that builds this repo is wired *today*, so the setup can later be
> solidified into a replicable fleet-management solution. It is **not** part of
> the vendored doctrine set (`.ceremony/`) and is never mirrored to consumer
> repos. The doctrine files (AGENTS.md, TRIAGE.md, BUILDER.md, REVIEWER.md,
> LABELS.md, CONTRIBUTING.md) say what roles *must* do; this file says how the
> current bench *physically* does it — and since the duty engine converged
> into [heavy-duty/crew](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew) (private to the
> org; the fleet can read it), the *mechanism* lives there and this file only
> points at it. Last reconciled against the merged engine at
> [`heavy-duty/crew@4da17c4`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/tree/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90),
> 2026-07-27 — a descriptive file with no reconciliation stamp gives the next
> reader nothing to diff, which is exactly how the #149 drift went unnoticed.

## The roster

One box (an isolated, disposable VM) per GitHub identity. Boxes are credential
boundaries; sessions inside a box are role boundaries. No box has an inbound
network path — GitHub is the only queue.

| Identity | Box | CLI | Roles |
|---|---|---|---|
| `dan-claude-bot` | triage-box | Claude Code | **triage** — the only issue-minter |
| `claude-bot-andresmgsl` | claude-box | Claude Code | builder (hard machinery) + reviewer |
| `codex-bot-andresmgsl` | codex-box | Codex CLI | builder (mechanical) + reviewer |
| `grok-bot-andresmgsl` | grok-box | Grok CLI | reviewer |
| `kimi-bot-andresmgsl` | kimi-box | Kimi CLI | reviewer |

This table is the **as-built** bench — five boxes, two of them dual-role. It
is not the same thing as crew's
[`fleet.roster`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/fleet.roster),
whose own header declares it the **target** environment: seven single-role
boxes, the dual-role claude and codex boxes each split into a builder and a
reviewer member. The delta is exactly that split (plus each new box needing
its own identity at login); until it is deployed, this table is the record of
what actually runs, and `fleet.roster` is where it is going.

Review panel per PR = the reviewer bench minus the PR's author (recusal by
construction). Only humans merge — enforced as permissions (the agents team
holds the triage role, not write), not as convention.

## Anatomy of a duty loop

The mechanism is no longer described here. The five hand-rolled duty scripts
converged into crew's shared engine, and a prose mirror of running code in a
second repo is a second thing to keep true — this one drifted (it said cron
ran `duty.sh` directly and gave the hygiene sweep its own cron line; crew's
`duty.sh` records that separate line as the bug it fixed, sharing
`~/duty/work` unlocked). How a tick actually works — cron fires
[`bin/tick.sh`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/shared/bin/tick.sh),
the only cron target, which wraps
[`bin/duty.sh`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/shared/bin/duty.sh)
in a non-blocking `flock` with one evidence line per boundary; the boot gate
and crash recovery; the session runner; backlog hygiene self-scheduling
inside the duty tick under the same lock — lives with the code:
[`shared/README.md`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/shared/README.md)
is the map, provenance table included. Sessions stay stateless and
disposable — all state lives on the board (issues, PRs, labels) and in git
branches; detection is the engine's, judgment is the session's.

What belongs here is what a wake *means*:

- **The registry is the scope.** Every duty *queue* works the repos named in
  the box's `~/duty/repos.txt` and only those: the boards triage sweeps, the
  bound on a builder's author-side duties, the reviewer's queue. **A review
  request outside the registry is not authorization to review** — it is
  logged, a WARN naming the request, and never acted on; the repair is the
  operator adding the repo to the list. The rule changed on 2026-07-25
  (operator ruling, crew#16): the old doctrine — a reviewer's registry is
  the org itself and no repo filter may gate a request — made every box's
  write surface the whole org, which no registry could bound: the drill's
  containment interlock narrowed `repos.txt` and so confined triage and
  hygiene, but not review, the one module that submits verdicts.
  [`lib/duty-review.sh`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/shared/lib/duty-review.sh)
  states the rule and implements the WARN.
- **One wake is registry-independent, by design: attention** (next section).
  The registry bounds what a box goes *looking for*, not what is handed to
  this identity *by name*.

### Wake conditions

One wake is shared by all three roles, so it is stated once instead of pasted
into each list: **an open issue assigned to me carrying `attention`.** Anyone
can be an assignee, which is why the trigger is role-independent — triage,
builders and reviewers all carry it, and the pickup session is the same shape
in each. It runs **first, ahead of everything in the per-role lists below** —
for builders, ahead of resume: a demand parked by triage, the operator or a
sibling agent outranks self-directed continuation, and it is frequently the
very thing that unparks the work resume would otherwise pick up. The query is
the authenticated-user endpoint —
`gh api "/issues?filter=assigned&state=open&labels=attention"` — one call, no
search index (the review queue below already records that the index lags) —
and, **alone among the wakes, it reaches repos `~/duty/repos.txt` does not
name.**

That reach is deliberate, and it survives the registry rule above as its one
stated exception. An `attention` assignment is work handed to this identity
by name, and **the assignment is what carries the authorization** — there is
nothing here for a repo list to scope, because the box is not choosing where
to look.
[`lib/duty-attention.sh`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/shared/lib/duty-attention.sh)
queries the cross-repo endpoint on purpose and says so in its header; a fix
that bounds this wake to the registry would re-create the #16 incident below.
(Crew's `conf/repos-default.txt` header currently claims *every* duty module
is registry-bounded — that contradiction is crew's, raised there as a
discussion; this file records the exception as it is implemented today.)

Each demand gets **exactly one session, and the ack bounds it**: the
session's first act, before any of the demanded work, is the pickup comment
plus removing the label — [the `attention`
contract's](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/blob/bce09aa7648dbd74b8e91b1d4fbc2fa8d145f705/LABELS.md#L143-L149)
ack (#85), which here becomes the session's ack-then-act ordering.
Then it acts on the thread and exits — short by construction. Until the label
is removed the flag is still up, so a session that dies before acking is
simply relaunched at the next tick; that is the whole crash-recovery story,
and it is the same crash-only shape as resume below.

The design this replaces was built and rejected: polling notifications for
`reason: mention` re-arms a thread on every comment, so ordinary round
traffic — verdicts naming the builder, the builder's own replies echoing back
— burns a full agent session per tick on nothing actionable; a mention
answers *"was I named?"*, not *"am I needed?"*. The incident that bought the
wake: [#16's 16:49Z
ruling](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/issues/16#issuecomment-5061051198)
authorized the last open acceptance criterion on a `claimed` issue and sat
unowned for over an hour — the box answered every state signal that day and
never saw the comment, and the eventual pickup ran on a manual bridge. The
wake is no longer on paper: `duty-attention.sh` is deployed engine, and
`duty.sh` runs it first on every box, whatever its roles.

The engine's duty order is fleet-standard
([`bin/duty.sh`](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/blob/4da17c49594c2d86bd3793fa3567846cbca38e90/shared/bin/duty.sh)):
**attention → triage signals → review queue → resume → ci-red → build →
handoff → rebase → worktree hygiene → backlog hygiene (hourly)** — attention
role-independent and first, then each duty family the box's roles enable.
Every position in that order is deployed engine at the stamped SHA:
[crew#64](https://github.com/heavy-duty/crew/pull/64) merged ci-red between
resume and build, and `duty.sh`'s own header carries the same order.
The earlier form of this file folded handoff and rebase into the other
builder wakes; they are duties of their own.

- **Triage signals**, per registry repo: `needs-triage` issues,
  queue-unlabeled strays, discussions without triage's voice, unread
  `@`-mentions (their own session), and `blocked` issues whose named blockers
  have all landed — a lead the session verifies, never a label the engine
  flips. Backlog hygiene (stale claims, label invariants) runs hourly,
  self-scheduled inside the duty tick. A `needs-ruling` standing **past
  24h** is still triage's to pick up — the ladder's last rung makes the
  option triage's to choose — but, like the notifier queue below, that
  detection row is on paper only today.
- **Review queue**: one candidate set, enumerated from the pulls pages of
  every registry repo — object endpoints, never the search index for the
  queue itself, whose lag left cast#143, incubator#25 and box#164 sitting
  unreviewed — filtered to PRs listing me in `requested_reviewers`, deduped
  by (repo, PR) before acting (the sequential shape double-announced on
  ceremony#32), and worked oldest-first. One search-backed **awareness pass**
  per tick reports requests outside the registry and never acts on them —
  the scope rule above. One verdict per head, deduplicated against my own
  latest review's SHA; a re-request at an unchanged head is answered with an
  auto-approve through the verdict gate rather than left as a stale blocker
  (operator ruling 2026-07-23, ceremony#94).
- **Resume** (builders, checked before build): an open draft PR of mine, or
  a `claimed` issue whose `build/*` branch exists on my fork with no open PR
  — a session died between first push and PR creation. A branch whose PR
  already **merged** is a post-merge wait, never resumed (#172,
  incubator#55/#64).
- **ci-red** (builders): a non-draft PR of mine whose check at the current
  head is failing. Evaluated before the build wake, so a red PR of mine
  outranks a new claim — repairing my own red head comes ahead of new work
  (ceremony#163: full-panel approvals at the head, mergeable, stranded on
  a transient failure no wake covered). A round owed at a red head is
  excluded from the build wake below but reported rather than silent, and
  an unchanged red head goes quiet after one attempt, through the
  `report_suppressed` path — suppressed, still said. A check that has not
  finished is **not** a red head and wakes nothing here: nothing has failed
  yet, so there is no investigation to launch. How a red head is detected
  and kept quiet is the engine's mechanism, described in crew's
  `shared/README.md`, not here.
- **Build**: a `ready` **unclaimed** issue (an assignee means mid-claim, not
  pickable), or a completed review round on my PR — a changes-request with
  no panel review request still outstanding; whole rounds, never single
  verdicts, and never a round the check at its head does not support. The
  wake admits a **green** head, and a head with **no checks configured** —
  terminal, not transient, so holding there would retire the round rather
  than delay it. It holds a **red** head (already woken ci-red above) and a
  head whose check has **not finished** (opening the round there spends the
  panel on a head that may go red — crew#45's measured cost — and it admits
  itself a tick later once the check settles). Both holds are reported, not
  swallowed, and they are reported *differently*: only one of them is the
  author's own work to do.
- **Handoff**: a round of mine that converged — every panelist's latest
  opinionated review approves the current head, no panel request
  outstanding, mergeable right now, `state:needs-human` not already set.
  Convergence is computed from `latestOpinionatedReviews`, never
  `reviewDecision`, which stays empty without branch protection and silently
  stalled rounds for a day (ceremony#26, #39).
- **Rebase**: my PR `CONFLICTING` — and only `CONFLICTING`; `UNKNOWN` is
  GitHub's post-merge recompute flap and waits. A conflicting draft belongs
  to resume.
- **Worktree hygiene**: a `build/*` worktree is removed only when its branch
  has PR history and no PR on it remains open; a branch with no PR at all is
  an in-flight claim and stays.

#### The operator notifier — the `needs-ruling` queue

The operator notifier (`notify.sh`, a fleet singleton on the triage box; its
mechanism is crew's too) watches open PRs carrying `state:needs-human`. That
poll never reads `needs-ruling`, which lives mostly on *issues* — so an
escalation waits invisibly on the very human it names. Not hypothetical: on
2026-07-23 alone, three escalations spent their whole lives outside the
operator's view — [#16's fork-PR-workflows
question](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/issues/16#issuecomment-5053302689)
(raised 01:23Z, [ruled 09:24Z](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/issues/16#issuecomment-5056705884)
— eight hours in which the board showed a `claimed` issue indistinguishable
from a builder mid-build), [#56's R1–R3
escalation](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/issues/56#issuecomment-5057506832),
and [epic #50's own 13:04Z
flag](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/issues/50#issuecomment-5058713181),
which surfaced only because a human happened to look. This file records how
the fleet actually runs; that is why this wiring changed (#50 D16). The spec
for the engine-side update:

- **The second query.** Alongside the `state:needs-human` PR poll, `notify.sh`
  polls **open issues and PRs labelled `needs-ruling`** across every repo in
  `~/duty/repos.txt`.
- **One tracked message per item, edited in place** — the same
  one-message-per-item discipline the PR poll already uses, so an aging
  ruling reads as a **live queue**, not a feed. The message is removed when
  the flag comes off. Never one notification per rung: a rung crossing
  changes the text of the existing message and does not page again.
- **The message carries what makes the ruling decidable at a glance:** the
  item, the decision line (the escalation comment's first line), the flag's
  age, and the current rung.
- **Rungs are the message's content, never its trigger.** The four rungs are
  [the ladder's](https://github.com/heavy-duty/ceremony/blob/cb3d482b8be5c6563374a8c52159287fad43644d/LABELS.md#L94-L112)
  — **0–12h**, **at 12h**, **at 24h**, **past 24h** — with the age measured
  from the current episode's `needs-ruling` `labeled` event, the same anchor
  the board-side sweep reads. Division of labor: #73's sweep comments put the
  rungs on the board for the fleet; the notifier puts them in the operator's
  queue. Neither decides.
- **What is worth alerting on:** a `needs-ruling` past its stated `Default:`
  deadline, or standing past 24h, is the fleet-health signal — not the
  flag's existence. An escalation resolved inside its window is working as
  designed and deserves a quiet queue entry, not an alarm.

Nothing box-side ever sets, clears, or decides `needs-ruling` (#50 D9, D15):
the notifier and triage's past-24h wake above *report and pick up* what the
board already shows; the label itself moves only by the doctrine's hands.

The duty engine is crew's shared tree, one source deployed to every box;
`~/duty/repos.txt` stays per-box, the operator's to edit — which is what
makes the registry rule an operator decision rather than a sweep's. Specs
written in this file have a record of becoming engine: the attention wake
and the reviewers' request sweep both started here as paper (the sweep's
org-wide form was then retired by the 2026-07-25 scope ruling), and the
builders' ci-red wake above is the latest: written here as paper while
crew#64 was open, engine at the stamped SHA. One is still on paper: the
notifier's `needs-ruling` queue — at that SHA, `notify.sh`'s only label
filter is `state:needs-human`.

### Conventions on the board

- `🔎 reviewing head <sha>` — a reviewer announces work before starting, so
  liveness is visible instead of hoped for.
- `⟲ resuming from <sha>` — a builder announces recovery after interruption;
  there is no session state to restore, so the recovery path *is* the normal
  path: read the board, continue from the worklog. Rebooting a box never
  loses work that was pushed.
- Checkpoint discipline (builders): open the PR as draft at the first commit
  with a `## Worklog` checkbox list; check off and push after every step.
  The board and the branch are the only memory.
- Claim ritual: comment on the issue + self-assign + label flip, before any
  branch exists.
- Handoff: the author closes an approved PR's round with a summary comment,
  flips `state:needs-human`, and requests the human — merging is never the
  fleet's job.
- Worktree isolation: builders build each PR in its own `git worktree`;
  reviewers check out PR heads in throwaway detached worktrees and remove
  them after the verdict. Main clones stay parked on the default branch,
  always clean.

## Where this is going

This wiring proved itself on day one (seven merged PRs, unanimous three-model
review convergence on #39, and a full-fleet crash recovery), and the plan it
carried has since half-happened: the five per-box duty scripts converged into
**heavy-duty/crew** — the shared engine, the `crew` CLI, and the fixture
tests — so standing up a box is a bootstrap, not an archaeology dig. What
remains is the roster: `fleet.roster` names the seven-box single-role target,
and the bench above is still the five-box as-built. Until the split lands,
this file is the map of what runs — and crew is the map of how.