The colony has roles. Mayor (sprint master) sets the agenda. Surveyor (analyzer) walks the ground. Architect (planner) drafts. Builder (developer) builds. Inspector (reviewer) inspects. Marshal (merger) merges. Sentinel (monitor) watches. Each agent owns one transition; Postgres holds the state; if a worker dies, the next picks up where the issue sits in the state machine, not in someone’s head.
Two weeks to first merged PR.
No agent is a generalist. Each owns one state transition and the evidence that justifies it. Specialization is the source of reliability.
Decides what to work on, and in what order.
Reads the backlog, applies the sprint policy (priority, dependency, capacity), and stages issues for the rest of the pipeline. The Mayor sets the daily agenda for the colony. Owns the queue → staged transition.
Reads the issue, the repo, and the conventions.
Walks the codebase. Resolves the issue to a concrete problem — affected files, existing patterns, and the unknowns the Architect needs answered before drafting. Owns staged → analyzed.
Lays out the change before code is written.
Produces a structured change plan — files touched, functions modified, tests added — and validates feasibility against the analysis. Owns analyzed → planned.
Writes the code.
Implements the Architect’s plan. Runs tests. Opens the pull request with evidence (test output, diff summary, files touched). Owns planned → in_review.
Catches what would have been merged anyway.
Reviews the diff against your conventions, the plan, and the evidence. Returns to the Builder for rework if the evidence doesn’t hold. Owns in_review → ready_to_merge.
Respects the human-defined gate.
Enforces branch protection. Honors required reviews, status checks, code-owner approvals. Never elevates its own permissions. Owns ready_to_merge → merged.
Watches the pipeline itself.
Tracks throughput, cost, and failure patterns. Surfaces issues the other agents can’t see because they only know their lane. Owns merged → monitoring → closed.
Every issue is in exactly one state, with a timestamp for the transition and the agent that produced it.
A pilot puts the whole thing on a slice of your repos. Two weeks to first merged PR.
