Concepts · Workers

Workers

A worker is a durable principal you hire to own one responsibility — one worker per report you want to read. It runs bounded shifts on its schedule, produces artifacts against its standing job, optionally publishes them to an outlet, and reports to your Inbox in plain language.

Vocabulary

Term	Meaning
Worker	The durable principal: identity, title, job, template allow-list, status (active \| paused \| retired). Tenure ends only by decision.
Title	The worker’s role, especially within a team (e.g. Illustrator). Colors how it signs its reports; no routing keys off it.
Team	A department: named for what it PRODUCES (its domain — members inherit it as their specialty), with an optionally designated outlet — the fence: everything the crew publishes ships there.
Specialty	The worker’s own WHAT — it steers what every shift plans and produces. Blank on a team = inherit the team’s produces; a solo worker must state one. No worker exists without a WHAT.
Solo outlet	A worker’s own channel, active only while solo. Joining a team defers to the team’s outlet — the solo outlet stays set but dormant, and wakes back up on leaving.
Job	The standing per-shift spec: what to produce, how many, at what caps, in what voice, and where it publishes. Singular by discipline — the countable things that run are runs and orders.
Shift	One bounded activation: trigger → plan → execute → publish → report → halt. A shift always ends; its record links every run, order, artifact, and message it touched.
Schedule	The WHEN primitive — a cron expression (UTC) that wakes a worker, or fires a single template directly.
Trigger	What started a shift: schedule or manual run-now.
Report	One Inbox message per shift, written in the worker’s own voice per its messaging spec. Figures come from the mechanical record — never invented.

The shift

one shiftascii

trigger (schedule or run-now)
   └─▶ SHIFT
        1. CONTEXT — read the catalog census + assigned work
        2. PLAN    — run a plan template (an internal, attributed run)
        3. EXECUTE — place a Generation Order (children fan out)
        4. PUBLISH — ship gated output to the job's outlet (optional)
        5. REPORT  — one Inbox report, in the worker's own voice
        └─▶ HALT   — a shift always ends; stop conditions escalate

Every run a shift creates is attributed to the worker (createdVia: "worker" + workerId), so the whole trail — plan runs, order children, artifacts, spend — is auditable per worker, per shift.

The job

Worker.jobjson

{
  "contentTypes": [{
    "key": "clipart",
    "planTemplate": "plan-clipart-batch",
    "targetTemplate": "generate-clip-art-asset-v2",
    "count": 50,
    "budgetUsd": 3.50
  }],
  "failureThreshold": 0.2,
  "defaultPriorities": "flowers, animals, space",
  "publishPolicy": "classified",
  "messaging": {
    "tone": "warm, direct, first person",
    "cadence": "every-shift",
    "requirements": ["per-type counts", "total spend"]
  }
}

Producing is not publishing: publishPolicy is the worker’s selection bar (classified publishes only work the classifier titled and categorized; none, the default, publishes nothing). Where it ships is the framework below — destination lives on the worker’s assignment, never in the job (and never on a goal).

Teams, designations, and where work ships

One law governs distribution: designations and sections decide where work ships. Demand has its own hierarchy: the team’s produces (its domain) → the worker’s specialty (narrower, inherited when blank) → goals (measurable campaigns, refining further). The resolved specialty steers every shift’s planning — and a worker cannot exist without one.

On a designated team → the team’s outlet. Period. A team with an outlet is a publishing contract for the whole crew — the fence. A member’s Solo outlet defers (kept, dormant), a matching sibling section can’t poach, and no goal can redirect. “This team publishes only to X” is provable, with zero asterisks. A team without an outlet is organizational only.
Otherwise, the home site’s sections sort — the section outlet matching the artifact’s category claims it (/flowers catches flowers): permanent site taxonomy that outlives any goal.
The rest lands on the worker’s Solo outlet. No home channel → unpublished, never a wrong page. A hard pin for a solo worker is a team of one.

Every publish records its provenance (routedVia) and every assignment change is logged — designations are audit-grade. One artifact can still appear in many outlets via syndication: carrying is the outlet’s act, not the worker’s.

Stop conditions

A shift halts — never silently — when a stop condition trips: hard budget caps, a child-failure rate above the job’s threshold, or empty and skipped plans. Every breach files a high-priority task and an Inbox alert in the worker’s name, with the technical detail attached behind a disclosure.

The inbox speaks human

Workers communicate in natural language: what happened, what was done, what needs you. A report may be plain (the voice layer falls back to the mechanical summary on any failure) — but it may never be lost, and it may never omit assigned work.

Steering a worker

You steer a worker by assigning work, not by editing its job: goals carry measurable targets it plans against every shift, and scheduled tasks are day directives it checks off itself. See Assigned work.