Release 0.24.0
Your specialists now come with a pedigree
When work runs deeper than one generalist can hold, Chief of Staff builds you a team member for it: a comms writer, a software developer, a recruiter, whatever the work needs. Each one gets its own memory and its own way of working, and you keep talking to one place.
The awkward part was always the second half of that sentence. Where does a specialist's "way of working" actually come from? Until this release the honest answer was that it was invented on the spot. You asked for a recruiter, and a plausible recruiting method appeared. It usually read well. It had no provenance at all.
Start from something real
Now, when you create a team member, Chief of Staff first goes looking for a matching profile in agency-agents, an open, MIT-licensed catalog of roughly 300 specialist definitions. If it finds one, that profile becomes the foundation of the member's working method, and Chief of Staff refines it from there against published standards for the field, the way it did before.
The part that matters more than the catalog: the steps taken from a profile cite it.
Open the member's charter in your memory/ folder and you can see which parts of its
method came from somewhere, and which were written for you. A method you can audit is worth more
than a method that merely sounds authoritative.
If the catalog is unreachable, or nothing in it matches what you asked for, creation works exactly as it always has. This is a better starting point, not a dependency.
Disagree, then commit
The same release settles something that had been half-stated. Chief of Staff has always been willing to tell you an idea is bad. Nothing said what happens next.
Now it is explicit: once you have decided, it executes fully, without relitigating. And a recommendation you have turned down more than once stops being a debate to reopen and becomes a settled preference. It stops proposing it.
That second half is the one people feel. An assistant that never pushes back is useless, and an assistant that pushes back every single time is exhausting. The line between them is whether it can tell that you already answered.
Two sharper questions
Two judgment tests also moved into the places that needed them. Inbox triage now asks whether something would surprise you in a way that damages your position, which is a better test for what to escalate right now than importance alone. And decision briefs now check whether a deadline is real, because urgency wearing the costume of importance is exactly how a reversible decision steals attention from an irreversible one.
All of it ships as text you can read. Start with How it works, or go straight to the team member schema, the file that decides what a specialist is made of.