Dispatch and the Gatehouse

Handing a job to an agent is dispatch. It is a single explicit step, and it is where hm does most of its governing — because the moment a task is handed over is the last moment anyone can cheaply decide it should not be.

What dispatch does

Dispatch takes a task that has an owner, gives that owner a working directory of its own, assembles the context the task needs, and starts the executor configured for that seat. The worker gets a brief with the acceptance criteria in it, not a chat history.

Two properties are worth stating plainly. Each dispatched worker gets its own workspace, so two jobs running at the same time cannot overwrite each other's files. And an executor changes the state of the work only by calling hm — never by editing the record directly — so an agent cannot mark its own task landed, invent an initiative, or quietly rewrite what happened.

The Gatehouse

Finished work is not accepted because a worker says it is finished. It goes through the Gatehouse: the step that integrates completed work back into the project and closes the record over it.

The Gatehouse is where the preconditions are checked — that the work is on the branch it claims, that the workspace is clean, that the task it belongs to is actually complete. Work that fails those checks stays out, and the failure is recorded rather than swallowed.

This is the second half of why complete and landed are separate states. Completion is a claim made by the worker. Landing is a fact established by something the worker does not control.

Handing off between workers

When one piece of work depends on another, the dependency is written down as a coupling rather than left implicit in the order somebody ran things. A handoff that is recorded can be checked; a handoff that lives in an operator's head cannot.

What this buys you

The point of the whole sequence is that "an agent did it" stops being a reason to distrust the result. The work has a named owner, a brief that says what done meant, an isolated workspace, a record of every state change, and a gate it had to pass. Those are the same controls a company would put around a contractor, and they are the reason hands can be cheap.