Seats, hands, and lines

A Works has a roster, and the roster is configuration rather than code. It says which divisions exist, which roles sit in them, and what each role is responsible for. Changing it is an ordinary edit, and hm reads the new shape on the next run.

The two kinds of worker

A long-lived role on the roster is a resident. It persists across initiatives, it accumulates context about its area, and it has a standing mandate — the job it is there to do. A resident is a staffing decision.

A worker that exists for one ticket and then stops is a hand. It is dispatched, it does the task, it reports, and it is gone. Hands are how a Works absorbs a burst of work without permanently growing.

The distinction matters because the failure mode of an agent framework is a standing army: dozens of long-lived agents nobody can account for. hm's default roster is ten to twenty roles, and the guidance is to stack mandates on an existing role before adding another one. Capacity comes from hands.

A seat

A seat is one holder of one role — a position on the roster with an executor behind it. The executor is what actually runs when that seat is given work: a model-backed agent, a script, or a human being told what to do.

That last case is not a joke. A seat whose executor is a person is a legitimate configuration, and it is how a step that should not be automated stays inside the same record as everything else.

Lines and benches

A division of a Works is a line — a scoped stream of value with its own accountable lead and its own queue. A small Works has one; a larger one has a few.

Each seat doing real work needs somewhere to do it, and that working directory is a bench. Two seats working at once get two benches, so parallel work does not collide in a shared directory. A bench is a workspace with a lifecycle, and its lifecycle is recorded like everything else.

Reading the vocabulary

The words are deliberately industrial rather than clever. A line, a bench, a resident and a hand are all borrowed from how a factory floor is staffed, because that is the mental model that makes the rest of hm predictable: work arrives, it is assigned to a station, someone accountable does it, and it is inspected before it ships.