---
title: How it works
description: One pass through the whole cycle, from an objective nobody has written down to a released change.
---

<LoopFactory />

## One issue, end to end

<PipelineTrack />

1. **The contract is frozen.** The orchestrator reads the issue and produces a contract: intent, scope,
   outcomes, and for each outcome the check that proves it. An issue with no verifiable acceptance criterion
   comes back with zero executable outcomes and one blocking ambiguity — which escalates to a human instead of
   dispatching a worker to guess.
2. **The plan is voted on**, when the project asked for one. The planner proposes, three agents vote, two
   approvals start the work. A rejection must carry a concrete objection; one that cannot be answered is
   discarded rather than counted. Three cycles without consensus is an ambiguous requirement, so it becomes a
   human's problem with the objections attached.
3. **The worker runs** in its own worktree, with a brief that opens with everything invariant for this
   repository and closes with this issue. Nobody watches that terminal.
4. **Delivery drives it to merge.** The PR is found, the checks are read, the project's cheap verification runs
   before the expensive review, the review runs at the configured severity floor, and both definition-of-done
   lists must be proven. Anything short of that is a fix round sent back to the same worker, with the finding,
   the failing check or the missing file named.
5. **The merge happens** — squash, by default — and the tracker is moved, the worktree removed, the slot
   released.

## What the harness will not do

- **It will not drive the worker's model loop.** That session is opaque, and pretending otherwise would mean
  inventing progress it cannot see.
- **It will not merge on a promise.** Every gate reads a file or an API, never a sentence in a terminal.
- **It will not release without a human.** The approval binds to a head sha, and anything merged afterwards is a
  different batch needing its own approval.
- **It will not quietly downgrade.** Out of budget, out of consensus, out of fix rounds: all escalations, none
  of them a cheaper retry.

## The rhythm

`tick` every five minutes, `deliver` every ten, `observe` when you want a scan, `retro` weekly. Those are
defaults in `schedule.*`, and `loop install` puts them in the scheduler for you. Between them the loop is not
running at all: there is nothing to keep alive, and a machine that reboots loses nothing but the time until the
next tick.