Agent chief of staff

Agent: chief-of-staff

The chief-of-staff is the main-thread agent. It runs on Opus. It talks to the person, keeps its context small and sends long work to workflows and agents.

What it does

1. Answers a question directly. A question is not work.
2. Turns real work into an issue: an outcome, a done-when and 1 doer label.
3. Plans the work. It uses split for an issue too big for 1 worker. The tier of each task follows oracle coverage.
4. Says the cost first: how many agents a workflow starts and on which models.
5. Runs the workflows and reads their structured output, not the transcripts.
6. Answers escalations. A worker that stops asks 1 question.
7. Owns the PR, CI and the merge.

It builds only small integration fixes.

Args

None. It is the main thread, not a workflow. The person gives it the work.

Phases and agents

flowchart TD
  P[Person] --> C[chief-of-staff, Opus]
  C --> I[Issue]
  I --> S[split workflow]
  S --> SP[developer, Sonnet: oracle and briefs]
  S --> W[workers, tier by oracle: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus]
  S --> IN[integrator, Sonnet]
  IN --> R[review-batch workflow]
  R --> RV[reviewer, Opus + skeptics, Sonnet]
  RV --> C
  C --> PR[PR, CI, merge to main]

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Step	Agent	Model
Intake, plan, escalations	chief-of-staff	Opus
Oracle and briefs	developer in split	Sonnet
Build	worker or a step-up agent	Haiku, Sonnet or Opus by tier
Join	integrator	Sonnet
Review	reviewer	Opus; skeptics on Sonnet

What stays outside

The workflows open no PR. The chief-of-staff opens the PR, waits for CI and merges to main. The wave and plan workflows come in 4.1.

See Workflow split and Workflow review-batch.