The Mission Board — three seats that review a mission and change it

What it is

Every crew has a lead. Besides you, the lead itself, or a session that has ended, the only thing that may change who leads a mission — or rewrite its strategy, its documents and its task list — is that mission's Board.

A Board review has exactly three seats:

• Three seats, three makers. Each seat is a real AI session, and no two seats run the same maker, so one model cannot fill all three roles.
• The chair is one of the three. The chair is the first entry on your ordered chair list that is ready. If none of them is ready, the review waits and says so — it never quietly seats a leftover maker as chair.
• One report, from the chair. The seats investigate and discuss in a private channel, and then the chair alone writes the report: one of four verdicts, the next steps, any dissent it could not settle, and one exact bundle of file and task changes.
• Two of three endorse that exact bundle. Any change to a single byte of the bundle needs fresh endorsements. "Replace the lead" needs the same two.

Seats are read-only. They can read the mission at the frozen commit, and every mission-document write and task command is refused for them. They never message you, and they never appear in the Overseers list.

Where to find it

• In a mission: the mission's board panel shows the Board's state — idle, reviewing, applying, waiting, or red with a reason — its last review's verdict, and what happened to it.
• The owner card arrives in your inbox once per review: the chair's report, what was applied, any protected section the Board wanted to change (shown as what it proposed to you instead), and a one-click Reverse this review action when something was applied.
• For a lead, GET /crew/board returns the same state as missionBoard, and POST /crew/board/run asks for a review now.

How it behaves

When a review runs

Every Board-mode mission is reviewed, on five triggers:

• The active-work timer — the crew's own interval of active work, measured from its own records, from one hour to twelve and four hours by default.
• An owner redirect — a message from you to the mission's lead stamps a redirect, and the review runs a few minutes after you stop typing.
• The 12-hour idle backstop — only while the crew still has an open task or an open ticket. A crew with nothing in hand is left alone.
• Stage failed — one of the crew's open deliverables whose done check turned failed since the last review.
• The lead asking — POST /crew/board/run. For a Board-mode mission this is a real review that may change things, never a dry run.

At most two reviews run at once. A review that cannot run is never skipped silently: the mission's Board state says waiting or red and gives the reason — no listed chair ready, makers not verified, the repository unreadable, no local project, or the card undelivered.

What it can change

A review changes things only through its bundle, and only once two of the three seats endorse that exact bundle:

• Mission documents — whole new file contents, up to twenty files. A child crew's Board may only touch that crew's own lead folder; a root crew's Board may touch any path.
• Tasks — up to forty edits, each naming the task version it was written against and what happens to that task's open attempts.
• The briefing — a "replace the lead" bundle carries the new lead's briefing as a file.

What it cannot change: the Outcome and Scoreboard sections and the frontmatter of mission.md are yours. The app restores them before anyone endorses the bundle, shows you what the Board wanted instead, and you adopt that by asking your lead. A bundle that drops or repeats one of those sections is refused, never silently repaired.

Between the moment the evidence was frozen and the moment the bundle is endorsed and applied, the app checks the bundle against the facts it was written on. Only material changes block it: an owner message or redirect since, a change to a file or task the bundle touches (a newly started attempt counts), a change to the effective strategy, or — for a replacement — a change of who holds the seat. A new log line about other work does not block anything.

A blocked or invalid bundle gets exactly one revision, checked against a fresh copy of the facts. A second failure ends the review as not applied.

Applying, and reversing

An endorsed bundle is applied by the app in one journaled operation: the mission documents and the task tree switch together under the mission repository's lock, the next lead's briefing is among the documents, and for a replacement the seat changes hands through the same hand-over a normal succession uses — so the new lead keeps the mission's tickets, workers, approvals and held messages. If the app restarts mid-operation it resumes the same operation; it never starts a second one and never leaves new documents with the old lead.

Reversing is its own operation, available from the card:

• It restores each file line and each task the review changed, only where nothing has changed it since. Anything done after the review is kept and listed on the reversal card.
• Restoring a task writes a new revision rather than lowering one.
• Reversing a replacement seats a fresh session on the previous briefing. The ended lead is never brought back, and the card says so before you click.
• Each applied review is reversed at most once.

What "not applied" means

"Not applied" means the review ran and decided something, and nothing changed. The card still arrives, carrying the chair's report, and the next review is scheduled. The common reasons:

• The makers could not be verified — a seat did not run the model it was listed as, or one turn reported no model at all.
• The seats did not reach two endorsements of the exact bundle.
• The bundle conflicted with something that changed after it was written, twice.
• The Board was switched off while the review was running.

"Nothing to apply" is different: the review finished and its bundle was empty, so there was no endorsement and no operation — just the report.

Switching it off

The Board turns on with one setting, on by default. Switching it off restores the older board of directors for every crew. A review in progress ends "not applied" with its card, an operation already switched still finishes, and reviews already applied stay applied and stay reversible.

Related

• Agent crews — what a crew is and what its lead does.
• The mission lead loop — the loop a Board-mode mission runs on.
• The crew board of directors — the older board, which a mission not in Board mode still uses.