What is a line on a Team, and how do Rhythm, Authority, and instructions work?

What is an Engagement?

An Agent on one Team: “Bailey on Pricing.” It is a noun in the record, never a screen. It holds what the Agent knows here (its checks, its repository scope, the Playbook rules scoped to it), its track record on this Team, and its lines. On every surface you meet it as the Agent’s group of lines on the Team page.

That split is why one Proctor can serve four Teams without four copies of the same reviewer, and why the record of how it does on your web app says nothing about what it may do on your payments repository.

What is a line?

One thing an Agent does on a Team, written as a sentence with its blanks filled in and its Authority inside it. YAGNI writes the sentence; you fill the blanks. Some of the lines a Team can carry:

• Bailey proposes from the Checkout project every weekday at 9, or when asked, supervised by Priya.
• Reeve reads plans that touch migrations, auth, new dependencies before they are built, autonomous.
• Wright plans accepted tickets, supervised by Priya.
• Wright builds approved plans, supervised by Priya.
• Wright pushes fixes when changes are requested, up to 2 rounds, autonomous.
• Proctor reviews every PR on acme/checkout touching packages/api, except those by dependabot, supervised by Priya.
• Fletcher verifies every PR in the checkout environment, autonomous.
• Harper posts the Daily Brief to #checkout every weekday at 8, autonomous.

On the Team page the lines sit under the stage each acts on, Proposed through Done, then Any time for Harper’s. Only a line that is off, paused, or waiting on setup carries a word at its right edge.

What triggers a line?

One of four things, and the sentence says which. A Rhythm is a clock trigger in your words, with its own timezone: Bailey every weekday at 9, Harper at 8. An event in a connected tool: Proctor when a pull request opens or changes, Fletcher when one changes. The queue: Wright plans when a ticket is accepted and builds when a plan is approved. Or only when asked. Whatever the trigger, Run now on the line runs it once, even when the line is off, and Propose now does the same for Bailey.

A Rhythm belongs to one line and nowhere else. Neither the Team nor the Engagement has a schedule of its own.

What does Authority cover?

What the line may do without asking, bounded by the capability’s ceiling. Because a line has exactly one act, the word means one thing everywhere: “supervised by Priya” waits for that person, “autonomous” dispatches with a Receipt. The Ladder covers how a person moves it. Bailey caps at supervised. The merge is no line at all; it is a person’s click.

What is on a line’s page?

One scrolling column. The blanks first, one row each with a hairline between: when it runs, which repositories and paths, which authors, whose tickets, and the Authority with its supervisor. Then With these instructions, the box where you tell Reeve what to push back on at your company or tell Proctor what a clean review means here. Then, on Proctor’s line, the checks: one row per check with what it looks for, its own instructions folded behind a link, and Add a check. Then the recent runs, each opening to what it read and what it cost.

The footer is one line of consequence, Cancel, and Save. The header holds Run now (Review now on Proctor’s line) and a menu with Turn off and Remove.

What bounds a line?

The caps. Fix rounds per pull request (two by default), tickets in flight per Team (four), and the workspace’s daily ceiling, which every line shares. Above all of it sits the floor: merge, deploys, and anything irreversible stay a person’s, so Authority widens what a line does on its own, never what it can undo. Pause on the Team stops every line at once.

Where does a new line start?

At its default, which the Create a Team screen shows you before you click Create. Switch one on from the Team page when you want it, read a week of its runs, and move it up when its record has earned it. That is the whole management loop.