Effort joins model as a mandatory pin: an omitted field inherits the
session effort, coupling every dispatch's thinking budget to whatever
the user happens to be chatting at (often xhigh) — the same
session-state coupling the model pin removes. The assignment follows
the model split:
- xhigh on every opus agent (judgement roles are the pipeline's
quality floor and must not degrade with the session);
- high on every sonnet agent (tightly-scoped plan execution gains
little from xhigh but pays its latency per dispatch, and these are
the per-task in-loop roles — wall-clock is the efficiency metric;
not lower than high, since re-loops cost more than saved thinking);
- medium inline in the workflow scripts for schema-bound
extraction/verification stages that author no code (preflight,
plan-extract, mini-verify, tree-check, finalize, build/suite
verify).
Workflow agent() calls pass effort explicitly on every call — whether
frontmatter effort propagates through an agentType dispatch is
undocumented, so the scripts do not rely on it. Policy documented in
docs/agent-template.md § effort, mirroring § model.
Agents and workflows previously carried no model field, so every
dispatch inherited the session model — including fable, which is
banned for all plugin agents and workflows by owner decree. Every
dispatch now pins opus or sonnet explicitly.
- opus (low-volume judgment gates whose misses silently poison
downstream work): architect, bencher, debugger, fieldtester,
grounding-check, plan-recon, quality-reviewer, spec-skeptic,
tdd-author
- sonnet (mechanical scope, in-loop or fanned out): docwriter,
glossary-extractor, implementer, spec-reviewer, synthetic-user,
tester
- workflows: all 13 agent() call sites pin a model — sonnet
everywhere except the quality-reviewer gate in implement-loop,
the loop's last correctness check (spec-reviewer only gates
task-text correspondence; real-bug finding is the documented
opus strength)
- docs/agent-template.md: model is now a mandatory frontmatter
field, with the assignment rule and the fable ban recorded
Replace brainstorm's ~10 serial user round-trips with a parallel
populate-then-triage: enumerate the load-bearing forks, populate them with a
grounded synthetic-user swarm (mandatory per-answer citation), and triage — a
fork the swarm settles on a cited shared ground is decided (user vetoes), a
split or ungrounded-consensus is a direction fork the user settles. A
cross-check surfaces any fork the orchestrator's own enumeration held open but
the swarm closed. A fire-check + grounding floor skip the swarm when it would
be ceremony.
Under /boss the swarm runs autonomously: convergent forks are decided and
recorded on the reference issue, only a divergent direction fork (or a
sub-floor greenfield design) bounces. Retires trigger-4's "fresh brainstorm is
too high-context to run autonomously" rationale — the swarm is the compaction.
- brainstorm/agents/synthetic-user.md: new read-only swarm agent
- brainstorm/SKILL.md: full rewrite to the swarm flow + new Iron Law
- boss/SKILL.md: autonomous swarm-brainstorm (Iron Law, trigger 4, asymmetry,
notifications, rationalisations, red flag)
- docs/pipeline.md: brainstorm phase description
- specify/SKILL.md: brainstorm characterised as swarm discovery, not interview
closes#19
Brummel