The contract
The teammate first turns your goal into a contract and shows it at the top of the thread:- Result and deadline: what you expect, and by when.
- Target: where the measurement must land, such as at least 10.
- Measured by: a command such as your tests, a read of an App the teammate already has (Stripe, PostHog, GitHub, Search Console, Google Calendar…), the ticked lines of a list, or, when no figure is possible, your own judgment at the deadline.
- Allowed: the writes it may make without asking you, each one precise action with a cap, such as “Gmail: send, 20 a day”. Anything past the cap or outside the list asks you as usual.
- Budget: how much of your Claude or Codex subscription it may spend, sub-threads included, and the longest it runs.
How it runs
- Brigade measures, not the teammate. At the end of each turn, and every so often for an App or a list, Brigade runs the contract’s measurement. The goal is reached only when the measurement says so; the teammate cannot declare it done before.
- It keeps going. When a turn ends with nothing open and the goal not reached, Brigade prompts the teammate again with the latest measurement and what remains.
- It waits like any thread. While a ticket, a sub-thread, a review, a pull request or a wake-up is open, the thread sleeps. If the measurement moves away from the target meanwhile, the teammate is woken to adjust.
- It stops on its own at the deadline, when the budget is spent, or when nothing moves for several turns in a row, and the teammate writes a summary: the final measurement, what worked and what did nothing.
- It leaves room for your other threads. When your subscription’s usage window is nearly spent, the goal waits for it to reset.
- Your message comes first. A message you send cancels the next automatic prompt that has not gone yet.