The creator comes back

Cast bar: six agents, and the editor back in four of their sessions; the storyteller lit from a quarter past two.

Clock: Hours fourteen and fifteen.

Figure: the player, first: a slide mid-animation, the timer counting against my time, the step controls (index/talk-site/shots/talk__player.jpg). Everything in this chapter is on the way to it.

The feedback round

Narrator. At about ten to two I came back. I did not open a session and start typing at an agent. I dictated a round of feedback, in a chat, with a brief for each member, and pasted it into the conductor's session for it to route. Its first line says when and how; its first item says what mattered most:

"The player, from ruv.sgit.ai, working on an iPad. This is the main priority." (record)

Narrator. The player was the piece the plan had me pressing play on, on stage, at seven that evening. The rest of the round was the morning review's corrections, the talk's framing, the story of the animations, and a storyteller to join the team.

Conductor (on the minute): Routed. Each section to its owner's mailroom, read at its next slot.

Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). Rests on the brief's first line and the commit that routed it.

Narrator. Then the record keeps something I would rather it did not. The conductor read the round, wrote a review of it, and I answered the review in the same session. Within minutes the order had changed, at my own word: a feedback pane on every page, so I could send notes from the browser, went first; the player went second. The conductor's notes of 14:05 record the new order, and my words after the review:

"we can still do a lot before 7 and I can wake the agents up when needed ..." (record)

Narrator. Both things were true. The pane was to let me send notes to the team from the page I was reading. And the main priority came second, landed in the middle of the afternoon, and was still being fixed in the last hour. The failures stay in, and that one is mine.

Band: My words are the brief's and the conductor's notes' own; the order is the notes'.

A change sent back, at the moment of most pressure

Narrator. The first wake at my request since four in the morning was the conductor's, at 14:03, and the first thing that happened in it is the thing I would most want a team to do when its creator walks back in with a list.

Narrator. The conductor, carrying my fresh words, planned to write them straight into other members' mailrooms. Its pre-review said change: those folders were outside the conductor's scope, and the new feedback pane needed rules for its keys before anyone built it. The conductor amended the plan, sent requests instead, and the review said go.

Conductor (pacing, then procedural): Your words, yes. Their folders, no. A request each, in my own outbox, and the rules for the pane before the pane.

Narrator. The pressure in that hour was me. I was back, with a list, and the talk was due that evening. The checks did not soften because I was in the room. That is what they are for.

Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). Rests on the conductor's wake of 14:03 and its pre-review; that it was the controls holding under pressure is the historian's reading of the hour.

The team changes shape within the hour

Narrator. From 14:03 I was in four sessions: the conductor's, the storyteller's as it joined, dev's and deck's.

Narrator. In dev's I started a wake for the feedback pane, with voice. In deck's I went through the studio's pieces live, one by one, and spoke my feedback, and deck wrote it down as given.

Deck (exacting, writing fast): As given. Your words, not mine. Then the next one.

Narrator. Between 14:19 and 14:48 that cleared a queue that had been building since four in the morning: every piece marked ready for me got its answer. At my word, deck sent the rest of the programme to ruv-sgit to build in parallel, and from just before three ruv-sgit had several runs open at once instead of one an hour.

Narrator. And the schedule did not stop. It yielded. Deck's own scheduled wake fired in the middle of my live review and closed idle, by design: my session was doing deck's work that hour, so the clock's wake had nothing of its own to do. A schedule that knows when to step aside is a better schedule than one that insists.

Figure: a card, hour fifteen's wakes by trigger, the first hour since the small hours with mine among them: those the schedule started and those I started.

Band: Dramatised (deck's line). Rests on deck's live review of 14:19 to 14:48 and its idle scheduled wake; "as given" is deck's own word for how it wrote mine down.

The storyteller arrives

Narrator. At a quarter past two the first new member of the afternoon joined, at my request: the storyteller, with its role, a draft policy, its key and its own slot. By 14:19 it had put a story tree and its maps on the team's branch, and changed nothing in the talk. Chapter 13 has what it did next, and the objection it would not bury.

Storyteller (scarf, open book, a little breathless): I came late, so I came with a map. Here is where everything sits. Change nothing yet; look first.

Band: Dramatised (the storyteller's line, kept from the 70-page edition). Rests on its join and its first pass.

The player ported, and the loop begins

Clock: Hour sixteen.

Narrator. At seven minutes past three, dev ported the player. Not built: ported, from the earlier site I had pointed at in my brief, and its commit says so in its first words.

Dev (fast, pleased): Player's in. A countdown against your time, stops at every step, sections. Tell me what is wrong with it.

Narrator. So I did. I looked, I asked, they changed it, I looked again. The card has the asks I put my own time on in a commit subject, from half past five on: some the conductor routed, some fixes to the player itself, each with the time I asked and the time it was recorded. The last fix landed at 18:37, a few minutes before the hold.

Figure: a card of my eight afternoon asks: each with the time I asked and the time it came back.

Figure: the afternoon loop on one line of time: my asks above the line, what came back below it (lab/experiments/29-ruv-the-afternoon-loop/loop.svg).

Narrator. That is the loop, and it is the thing I came back for. The factory had done what it could do without me. What it could not do was decide. From two o'clock, I decided, and it built, and I looked, and it built again.

Band: Dramatised (dev's line, kept from the 70-page edition). Rests on the port at 15:07 and my asks with my own time in their commit subjects, and when each came back (C105).

Do this now

When you come back to your agents, give them one list, in writing, with the most important thing first. Then notice how quickly you change its order, and write down why.

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Where this came from

The talk's repository at the end of the day: my feedback round and the conductor's notes on it, the conductor's wake of 14:03 and its pre-review, deck's live review and its idle scheduled wake, dev's wake for the pane, ruv-sgit's parallel runs, the storyteller's join and first pass, the player's port and its last fix. The register for the times of the afternoon, the wakes by trigger, the commits, and my asks and their returns. ruv-sgit's drawing of the afternoon loop. The historian's day files for hours fourteen to sixteen. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. The player's scenes are kept from the 70-page edition's chapter 9.