Work with coauthors

Principles in play: Track records, Accept independently.TRACETrack records · Accept independently

When coauthors each work with their own agent, each trace record keeps the direction its principal gave. You can read what your coauthor asked for and decide on that work in your own name.

Steps

1. Give your task to your own agent, then finalize the record.

   Say to your agent

   I have read the draft. Finalize it in my name, Your Name, then commit and push.

2. Pull, and ask for the facts on your partner’s work.

   Say to your agent

   What arrived with the last pull? For each commit: what changed, what does the commit body say was asked, chosen and checked, and what does its trace record say was not checked?

3. Decide, even at the same moment as your partner.

   Say to your agent

   I accept B’s commit, the background paragraph and its two citations. Record my decision, commit and push.

   Both decisions go into ai/records/acceptances.jsonl, and both rows are kept whoever pushes first.

4. Name the owner when the work was assigned.

   Say to your agent

   This change is B’s: she assigned it to me in her comment on the results note. Record her as the owner, with that comment as the source.

Things to know

• Ownership follows direction. The people whose prompts or comments direct a change are its default owners, unless an explicit assignment says otherwise; recording an owner does not change the Git author.
• An actor that executed the work, or selected a choice in it, is not independent of it. When the execution markers of the covered commits, or the choices the record logs, name that actor, its attempt to accept is recorded as self-review. The tool cannot see who proposed the work, so independence also rests on who you ask to decide.
• The table says whose work it is. Each row shows its owners: those the record’s decisions name, else the people whose words it cites.
• Time decides, not push order. The latest decision on a commit stands by its time.

What the agent runs

python3 scripts/trace_record.py queue                        # what waits, one row per record, with its owners, then the commits that name no record
python3 scripts/trace_record.py brief <record-id>            # one record on one screen
python3 scripts/trace_record.py accept --record <record-id> --person \
    --by "Your Name" --recorded-by <model-id> \
    --words "what you said" --through <sha>                  # your decision, on the version the brief showed
python3 scripts/trace_record.py decision <record> --input <json>   # a consequential choice and its owners