A day in the life

This is a whole working session of the autonomous team, and you drive it: type /start-the-day, read what the morning ritual reports, walk the day an hour at a time, and end at wind-down, where it writes tomorrow’s plan — which you can take away with you.

Every event in it is real and timestamped: which pull requests opened, when each review landed, which merged, and every Discussion filed along the way. What is not captured is the morning script’s own output — start-the-day.sh pulls main, runs eight self-heal fix-ups and writes a plan file, so it is not run to build a web page. Its sections are read from the script; its values come from the repositories.

Reading the day…

The same thing, in words

A session begins with /start-the-day, the Team Lead’s morning ritual. It checks the loop actually ran, syncs to fresh main, restores HEAD if a crashed agent left the checkout on somebody else’s branch, verifies the external state directory survived the night, runs the sweeps — budget, subscription, open pull requests, how many Discussions are ready to work — and prints the plan.

Then the day: Discussions become consensus panels, panels become specifications, specifications become pull requests in isolated worktrees, and reviewers send changes back until the merge gates pass. Several run at once, which is why opens and merges interleave.

It ends at wind-down, where the Team Lead writes tomorrow’s plan: what merged, what is still in flight, what got filed along the way, and the standing mistakes-to-avoid list read back every morning. That file is the handoff — the mechanism that makes a session which ends still connect to the one that follows it, and the closest thing an agent team has to memory.

Where the instructions live

Three layers, and they are separate on purpose. The canonical CLAUDE.md carries the Team Lead Operating Protocol and is engine-synced — every project running FULCRUMAXE gets the same one. CLAUDE.project.md, the file the interview generates, is only an overlay: your project’s identity, stack, deploy target and dials, which is all an interview can honestly know. And each role that gets spawned reads its own template from backend/spawn_templates/ — a code-reviewer never loads the Team Lead’s protocol, it loads a reviewer’s brief.