---
layer: as-is
status: implemented
code: [hal]
updated: 2026-08-23
decisions:
  - 02-DECISIONS/0003-agents-are-persistent-employees.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0020-the-mesh-is-governed-by-a-constitution.md
---

# Agents and work

The mesh does a large share of its own design and implementation. Agents are how, and the
model they run under is the employee model, not a worker pool.

## An agent is an employee

An agent is a singular named identity with a home node, a workspace on that node, accumulating
memory, and an explicit lifecycle
([ADR 0003](../../02-DECISIONS/0003-agents-are-persistent-employees.md)).

| Property | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Lifecycle state | Active, draining, or retired. Retired agents are kept. |
| Home node | Where its workspace lives. One node per agent. |
| Session cap | How much work it may hold at once. **Concurrency is a property of the agent, not a count of copies.** |
| Kind | Whether it is hirable, or is a node's own agent and exempt from hiring |

The verbs are explicit: an agent is **hired** onto a node, **reassigned** only while idle, and
**retired** by draining first — forcing it is a deliberate act that aborts work in flight.

Surge capacity lives inside the model rather than against it. A template agent is a blueprint
with no life of its own; when a queue grows past a threshold it is cloned into a real agent
with a lifetime, which drains and retires when that expires. A temporary employee is still an
employee.

Because there is a continuing subject, **policy becomes possible**: an agent that violates a
rule can be warned, and a warned agent can be dismissed. A pool cannot be warned.

## Some agents are human

There is one kind of participant. What differs is **modality** — a non-human agent acts through
a spawned session and the record; a human agent acts through a shell, a desktop, or a message.
Both hold identity, both act, both accumulate memory.

The mesh does not currently record modality completely. Which user, on which node, a human
agent acts as is **required by the model and not stored** — an open question carried over from
[ADR 0001](../../02-DECISIONS/0001-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md).

## Work

Work is expressed as tasks moving through workflows. A workflow names the states a kind of work
passes through and what must be true to leave each one; a task carries its acceptance criteria
and its trail.

Several workflow shapes exist for different sizes of work — a single implementation, a larger
container of related work, and shapes that add analysis or design stages ahead of
implementation.

The area's characteristic defects are **transition** defects rather than logic defects: a task
bouncing between review and implementation because a guard was evaluated on stale state, a
result that cannot be recorded in the same act as the transition it justifies. The workflow
engine's correctness is about atomicity, and that is where it has been wrong.

## Meetings

Some work is decided in a **meeting**: several agents in turns, with distinct roles, over a
template that names the phases.

This is where governance meets execution. The constitution is injected into every eligible
meeting turn — agents do not fetch it, it arrives — and a check phase verifies the meeting's
output against it before the meeting may proceed
([ADR 0020](../../02-DECISIONS/0020-the-mesh-is-governed-by-a-constitution.md)). A named violation
blocks progress.

Meeting turns run on the orchestrator's node regardless of where the participating agents are
pinned. That is a known divergence between the model and its execution, not a design intent.

## What this rests on that is not built

The work domain shares one large schema with several other domains. That is the concrete
instance of a rule stated in [`how-we-build.md`](../../00-META/how-we-build.md) — *contexts
integrate through the record, never through a shared schema* — being violated by the mesh's
own largest component, and it is the reason work that belongs to one domain keeps having to be
implemented in another.

[ADR 0001](../../02-DECISIONS/0001-mesh-brokers-nodes-host-agents-think.md) dissolves that arrangement.
Until it does, this is the shape.