GTS 1 Task State

GTS-1 · Task State

Answers: where is this piece of work, right now?

The floor of the stack. Without it, agents duplicate work, redo finished work, and lose track of who owns what. Six fields minimum.

The five invariants

An implementation is GTS-1 conformant if and only if:

ID	Requirement
GTS-1.1	Single owner — at most one owner at any instant; handoff changes it atomically
GTS-1.2	Append-only attempts — attempts and decisions are never edited or deleted, only appended
GTS-1.3	Explicit done_when — done is reachable only when every done_when item is checked; no implicit completion
GTS-1.4	Handoff carries context — changing owner requires a handoff.note; a task never moves silently
GTS-1.5	Audit link — every state change is referenced in an external tamper-evident log (audit_ref)

Why append-only kills loops

GTS-1.2 is the invariant that does the most work. When attempts can be overwritten, the next owner inherits a task with no memory of what already failed — so it tries the same thing again. Append-only means the next owner sees what failed, which is what actually breaks the retry cycle.

Why done_when must be explicit

"Done" decided by the agent that did the work is not a status; it is an opinion. GTS-1.3 forces completion criteria to be written down before work starts and checked off individually. An agent cannot declare victory it has not earned — which is the same discipline as honest failure (GOS-0 Constitution).

Machine-validatable schema

schemas/task-state-v1.json — CI verifies it is a valid JSON Schema (Draft 2020-12) on every push.

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📖 Spec: spec/GTS-1-task-state.md · Normative IDs: Conformance → Next: GPS-2 Permission