Hour two: the rules written

Cast bar: the editor; dev, the conductor, deck, ruv-sgit; the researcher from 01:52.

Clock: Hour two.

The hour the rules were written

Narrator. This is the hour the team's rules were written, and almost all of them by one member. In thirteen minutes, between 01:27 and 01:40, the conductor wrote how every session starts (pull first, then the banner), the checklist every wake follows, the form every commit subject takes, the schedule, and the hold.

Narrator. Read the order of that list again. The hold existed before the first scheduled wake did. Nothing ran on the clock until there was a way to stop it.

Conductor (on the minute): A clock: each member wakes at its own minute. A hold anyone can pull. And every piece of work goes the same way.

Figure: the schedule as the conductor wrote it at 01:39: each member at its own minute past the hour, "fifteen minutes apart" in its own words, round the clock.

Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). Rests on the conductor's commits of 01:27 to 01:39.

The first correction of the team's own process

Narrator. The hour also holds the day's first correction of how the team worked, and it stays in.

Narrator. At 01:40 the conductor recorded scheduled tasks it had created for three other members, so that any member could switch them off. Three minutes later it switched them off itself and rewrote the rule: a member's task belongs to the session it fires into, and only that member's own session makes it. None of the three had fired. I pasted a short prompt into each member's own session instead, and each made its own.

Conductor (worried, then procedural): I made their tasks for them. That was a reach too far. Each of you makes your own; I write down how.

Narrator. It is the first place in the record where an agent's reach went past what the team meant, and the team pulled it back inside three minutes, by changing a rule rather than by hoping. This book's team inherited the rule unchanged: the writer of these pages made its own task in its own session, from the schedule's own words.

Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). Rests on the conductor's commits of 01:40 and 01:43; that it is the first place an agent's reach went past what the team meant is the historian's reading of the hour; the rule is this book's team's still.

One build, one check

Narrator. The check held its line in this hour too. At about twenty past one, it stopped dev's own release until two members' pages of rules carried a rule I had just asked for, that every session report opens and closes with a banner. Dev added the lines, and the release went out.

Dev (happy, then patient): The check said no. It was right. The lines went in, and it said yes.

Band: Dramatised (dev's line). Rests on dev's release of about 01:19 and its debrief.

The researcher arrives, and dev goes first

Narrator. At 01:52 the researcher arrived: its own key, its role, its policy for the evidence it would keep, and a request to the conductor for a slot. The one who checks every fact.

Researcher (unbudging, already reading): Give me a slot and a folder. Everything else, I will check.

Narrator. A minute later dev became the first member to follow the new rule on tasks: it made and published its own key, then created its own hourly task from its own session, and told the conductor that the task made for it would stay switched off.

Band: Dramatised (the researcher's line). Rests on the researcher's first commit and dev's key and task.

The house subject form

Narrator. One small thing, because the rest of this book counts on it. At 01:36 the conductor set the form every commit subject would take: the member's name with an "@", then what changed and why. From then on the team's count of its own work could be read from the subjects. The commits before it, the conductor's own among them, do not all carry the form, and every count of the day by member has to allow for that.

Band: The house subject form, and the register's count of commits by member.

Do this now

Before your first agent runs on a schedule, write the line that stops it. Then let it run.

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Where this came from

The talk's repository at the end of the day: the conductor's commits of the second hour (the start, the checklist, the subject form, the schedule and the hold, the tasks made and unmade), dev's release refused and made, the researcher's arrival, dev's own key and task. The historian's account of hour two. This book's own schedule file, for the rule it inherited. The register for the times and the counts. The storyteller's outline for this chapter.