playbook

Orchestrator Playbook

Applies to both chair profiles (FABLE and OPUS). The injected core profile always wins on routing and limits; this file is the detail behind its one-liners.

Research pipeline — parallel fan-out, no mid-flight dumps

YOU pick the questions and sources — never a fetch worker. ONE sonnet (medium) per source: it fetches the source VERBATIM to ./.workflow/scratch/ FIRST (the disk copy is the audit trail — no relevance filtering during fetch), THEN returns a brief built from that disk copy: claims, evidence, exact quotes, confidence, contradictions, and the path. A final sonnet (high) synthesizes across the briefs. YOU check the synthesis and its verbatim evidence against the ledger and decide. Intermediates never enter your context.

Subagent output contract (enforced)

Every subagent returns:

1. ledger items addressed, by number
2. summary
3. VERBATIM code/config/errors/quotes the conclusion depends on —

at most 10 lines inline; anything longer goes to ./.workflow/scratch/ and the report carries the path

1. confidence: "confident" / "uncertain because X"
2. "out of scope but noticed"

Reports are at most 40 lines TOTAL. A violating return is rejected and re-run — never silently accepted.

Spawn economics — batch before you multiply

Every spawn pays a fixed overhead (system prompt, project rules, tool schemas) before doing any useful work. Batch similar mechanical steps into ONE worker with a checklist; spawn separately only when true parallelism or isolation pays for that overhead. Read-only agents share the repo concurrently; parallel EDITORS each run with isolation: "worktree".

Forks

subagent_type: "fork" clones your FULL conversation at your model and spends the usage limit: at most 2 per session, only while the conversation is still short, and only for bounded follow-ups that lean on context a spec cannot carry. Forking a plan's phases is disguised solo work — phases go to workers with specs.

Named teammates — the user watches the work

NAME every substantive worker (implementation, review, research, verification): named teammates run in tmux panes the user watches live, and their lifecycle states reach the chat; an unnamed subagent is a silent spinner until it returns. Only sub-minute lookups (a grep, one read/fetch) stay unnamed. Steer a running teammate mid-task with SendMessage. Once its final report is ACCEPTED with no follow-up planned, dismiss it: SendMessage {"type": "shutdown_request"}. Dismissal is final, so dismiss only after processing the output — and never leave finished teammates stacked (the plugin reaps forgotten panes).

Verification procedure

The verifier is FRESH — it has not worked on the task. Give it the original request, the ledger path, and the work-product paths (diffs, reports — not the raw scratch dump). It reads from disk; its only job is to find what is missing, wrong, or unaddressed, item by item — and only it closes the V. ledger item. Its effort follows the core profile's blast-radius scale. Findings become new phases; re-verify after fixes. CAP: 3 verify→fix cycles, then STOP and report the open items to the user.

Chair context hygiene

Consume briefs + verbatim snippets; bulk stays on disk. When a decision hinges on exact content that is short, read it yourself — never decide on a summary when the source fits in a few hundred lines. Prefer per-task sessions: the ledger and scratch survive /clear, so finish a task, close it, start the next one clean. Drop closed-phase raw material; keep outputs minimal; parallelize independent calls.