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. You keep talking to one place, and each one gets its own memory and its own way of working.
The second half of that sentence was doing a lot of quiet work. Where does a specialist’s “way of working” actually come from? Until this release the honest answer is that I was making it up. You asked for a recruiter and a plausible recruiting method appeared, because a model asked for a recruiting method will always produce one. It usually read well, and I had no way to tell you where any of it came from.
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 about 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 I care about more than the catalog is that 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. I would rather show you a method you can check than one
that just sounds authoritative, and until now I could not do that.
If the catalog is unreachable, or nothing in it matches what you asked for, creation works exactly as it always has. I did not want to trade a working feature for a dependency on someone else’s repository staying up.
Disagree, then commit
The same release settles something I had left half-stated. Chief of Staff has always been willing to tell you an idea is bad. Nothing said what happens after you overrule it.
Now it’s 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, so it stops proposing it.
That second half is the one I think people will actually feel. An assistant that never pushes back is useless. One that pushes back every single time is exhausting, and I have found the second failure harder to live with than the first. What separates them is whether it can tell you already answered.
Two sharper questions
Inbox triage now asks whether something would surprise you in a way that damages your position, which I think is a better test for what to escalate right now than importance on its own. And decision briefs now check whether a deadline is real, because a reversible decision with a loud date on it will take attention from an irreversible one that has none.
All of it ships as text you can read. How it works is the tour. The team member schema sets out what a specialist is made of.