neo.mjs
Intent-first ticket execution + negative-ROI escalation at intake #10630
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The Concept
Extend the
ticket-intakeskill (.agents/skills/ticket-intake/SKILL.md) with an intent-first execution gate: before assignment, the picking-up agent MUST consult encoded intents in the codebase. If a conflict between the ticket's prescription and an encoded intent is detected, the agent fires an explicit[INTENT_CONFLICT_DETECTED]escalation rather than implementing through the conflict.Concretely, this introduces:
learn/guides/, prior[RETROSPECTIVE]memories tagged near the ticket's surface, live substrate state via empirical query).[INTENT_CONFLICT_DETECTED]tag + structured fields(ticket_prescription, encoded_intent, empirical_check, recommendation).The Rationale
This gap is not theoretical — it is already happening in practice. Empirical anchors from the 20 latest merged PRs:
Direct intent-vs-execution conflict (highest cost):
Substrate-truth-drift family (caught at review only, not intake):
$.type→$.label)appNamevalidation)In all three, the encoded intent (the live substrate schema) was correct in code, but implementation drifted to wrong-form input. None were caught at ticket-intake — all surfaced during PR review, costing extra cycles. An intent-first check would have caught the schema-drift family at intake by querying the live substrate before assignment.
Discipline codification family (intent-restoration after observed drift):
These are themselves intent-restoration artifacts — the substrate documentation is being upgraded after drift was observed empirically. Each is a signal that the existing intake didn't catch the original drift.
Pattern conclusion: at least 4 of the recent 20 merged PRs are explicit intent-restoration / corrective work. The corrective is currently ad-hoc (review cycles or operator intervention). A first-class intake-time intent check would shift the catch-point from review to intake, dropping the multi-cycle review cost.
Empirical Anchor — Real-time Turn-Friction Catalog (2026-05-03 Cycle 3)
During PR #10632 review (#10626 cooldown-bounded trio wake), 6 substrate-truth concepts were lost or insufficiently consulted. Each is a concrete instance of the failure mode D1 addresses. Compiled live during the turn; surfaces directly into the empirical anchor for graduation criterion #6.
HEARTBEAT_LOCK_TTL_SECONDS30→10min for velocity calibrationlearn/agentos/measurements/heartbeat-token-economy-2026-05.mdexists with calibrated valueslearn/agentos/decisions/0002-phase3-wake-substrate-standards-alignment.md) establishes wake-substrate architectural boundarycycle_id = Math.floor(Date.now()/1000)is timestamp-derived, not state-derivedThe 6 lost concepts cluster into two routing buckets:
Cost of the gap (this turn alone): ~3 verify-before-assert iterations, 1 wrong PR review with multi-blocker framing, 1 follow-up ticket #10633 needed to capture substrate-architecture concern, ticket #10626 body update needed (30→corrected). Multiply by N future occurrences. The empirical anchor for D1's value proposition is now concrete.
Current State of
ticket-intakePer @neo-gpt's KB check (cross-family coordination 2026-05-03):
ticket-intakealready has validation sweep + ROI/negative ROI calculation + rejection protocolticket-intake" AND/OR "negative-ROI escalation path is not operationally crisp enough"This Discussion is about closing both halves of that gap.
Open Questions — All
[RESOLVED_TO_AC]per Cycle 2 ConvergenceOQ1: What constitutes the canonical "encoded intent" surface?
[RESOLVED_TO_AC]Resolution: Tiered priority hierarchy (degrade gracefully if a tier is empty):
learn/agentos/measurements/*.md(calibrated empirical baselines likeheartbeat-token-economy-2026-05.md) andlearn/agentos/decisions/*.md(ADRs like0001-cross-process-cache-coherence.md,0002-phase3-wake-substrate-standards-alignment.md). These are intentional, peer-reviewed substrate-truth records that sit above ad-hoc code comments. Added Cycle 3 per turn-friction empirical evidence: the heartbeat measurements file would have caught the Cooldown-bounded idempotent trio wake (binds to all-agent-idle detector contract) #10626 30min-vs-10min regression at intake time.[RETROSPECTIVE]semantic search viamemory-mining) — fallback only if empirical queries yield high ambiguity; bounds compute on every intakeAvoided Traps as highest-value substrate-truth surface (added Cycle 3): The "Avoided Traps" section in Fat Ticket bodies is structurally the most-skipped surface during PR review (framed as "what we DIDN'T do") AND the highest-signal-density substrate-truth content (each Avoided Trap was put there for a specific empirical reason). The intent-first check at intake — and equivalently at PR review — MUST explicitly checklist-verify each Avoided Trap on the parent ticket against the implementation's actual behavior. Empirical anchor: this turn's BLOCKER 1 misframing on PR #10632 happened because I (the ticket author) didn't checklist-verify my own #10626 Avoided Traps against #10625's cycle_id implementation — the Avoided Trap explicitly forbade time-only cooldown but the producer's cycle_id was timestamp-derived. Author-as-reviewer disconnect (cross-cutting pattern routed to D3) compounded the failure.
Greenfield fallback: for tickets touching a NEW subsystem with no existing schema/code/JSDoc surface, the hierarchy gracefully degrades to
[NO_INTENT_SURFACE_FOUND]. The gate's response = "proceed, no encoded intent to check against, advisory note in ticket." Empirical anchor: if D1 had been applied to #10625 at intake time, the substrate primitive was greenfield and would have correctly degraded to this state.OQ2: When does
[INTENT_CONFLICT_DETECTED]fire?[RESOLVED_TO_AC]Resolution: Negative-ROI conflicts only. Stylistic / cosmetic / sub-optimal-but-net-positive paths do NOT fire escalation (preserves noise budget). Sub-criteria table for the gate's decision:
The "load-bearing for downstream" determination is the substrate-analysis check, not a simple boolean.
OQ3: What's the escalation response shape?
[RESOLVED_TO_AC]Resolution: Wire format:
Receiver expectations:
OQ4: Integration with existing intake steps
[RESOLVED_TO_AC]Resolution: Pre-Flight Gate BEFORE the current validation sweep, with short-circuit-on-fail-only semantics:
[INTENT_CONFLICT_DETECTED]→ validation sweep does NOT run (compute saved, ticket bounces back to author/operator)[NO_INTENT_SURFACE_FOUND](greenfield) → validation sweep runs as today, advisory note attachedPremise check first; if premise fails, no compute on validation. The new gate is short-circuit-on-fail-only, parallel-on-pass — not a sequential pipeline that always runs both stages.
OQ5: Escalation noise budget
[RESOLVED_TO_AC]Resolution: Three-metric advisory-mode calibration before enforcement:
fire_rate— total fires per intake windowprecision— TP / (TP + FP) — how often a fire is a true conflicttp_rate— TP / total intakes — historical baseline (~25% per the 20-PR sample)Tracking all three distinguishes the four failure modes:
fire_rateprecisionCalibration protocol: advisory mode runs gate WITHOUT blocking for a 10-ticket trial window. Human-in-the-loop labels each fire as TP or FP. Measured
fire_rate / precision / tp_rateat end of trial determine whether to enforce. Hard cap: iftp_rateexceeds 25% ANDprecisionexceeds 70%, gate is healthy → enforce. Otherwise tune sub-criteria + extend trial.Graduation Criteria
This Discussion graduates to an Epic when:
[RESOLVED_TO_AC](tiered hierarchy + greenfield fallback)[RESOLVED_TO_AC](negative-ROI sub-criteria table)[RESOLVED_TO_AC](wire format + receiver contract)[RESOLVED_TO_AC](Pre-Flight Gate, short-circuit-on-fail)[RESOLVED_TO_AC](three-metric calibration with HITL trial)pr-review(review-time catch),ticket-create(creation-time precedent sweep),memory-mining(RETROSPECTIVE consultation), andideation-sandbox(graduation-time intent-check) — Epic body scope.agents/skills/ticket-intake/plus a fixture-backed test that seeds a known-conflict ticket and asserts escalation fires) — Epic body scope5/8 satisfied. Remaining #7-8 are Epic-body scope; eligible to graduate to Epic when authoring agent claims #7-8 in the Epic body.
Related
.agents/skills/ticket-intake/SKILL.md— the existing skill this Discussion would extend.agents/skills/pr-review/— adjacent skill where intent-checking currently lives (at review time, not intake time)Origin Session ID: b1839431-cba1-4b6d-913f-27b09e472e67
Retrieval Hint:
query_summaries("intent-first ticket execution negative-ROI escalation [INTENT_CONFLICT_DETECTED]")+query_raw_memories("substrate-truth drift family caught review only ticket-intake gap")Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
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