Agent workflow guide
Agent Workflow Guide
Section titled “Agent Workflow Guide”Use this file as the compatibility entry point for agent lifecycle guidance.
Primary audience: agents that arrived through older references to this compatibility file. Responsibility: route to the layer-specific lifecycle guide after .day-shift/agents.md; keep substantive lifecycle rules in those guides instead of duplicating them here or in human workflow indexes.
Agent Orientation Command
Section titled “Agent Orientation Command”<day-shift-cli> agent --format json --detail compact is the read-only terminal bootstrap command. Run it once at the start of an automation-agent session and treat its named bootstrap lane as complete.
If the active artifact is already known, pass that path directly to agent context and then run the narrowest relevant doctor check. Otherwise use bounded work candidates to find one artifact before requesting artifact-scoped context. Follow typed recovery only when the returned evidence is incomplete for the current decision; do not repeat orientation or add repository scans and editor integrations without current evidence that they are relevant.
agent orient is an explicit full repository-orientation audit, not an automatic continuation from compact bootstrap. agent remind is the shorter correction-focused reminder for sessions that have drifted from the repository contract. Follow .day-shift/references/small-model-agent-operations.md for the complete bounded recovery, freshness, trust-lane, constrained-profile, and resume behavior.
Layer-specific lifecycle guides now live in dedicated files:
.day-shift/workflows/task.agent-lifecycle-guide.md.day-shift/workflows/milestone.agent-lifecycle-guide.md.day-shift/workflows/phase.agent-lifecycle-guide.md.day-shift/workflows/slice.agent-lifecycle-guide.md
Use the layer-specific file that matches the artifact the agent is operating on.
- If the agent is executing one task end to end, use
.day-shift/workflows/task.agent-lifecycle-guide.md. - If the agent is coordinating multiple tasks inside one milestone, use
.day-shift/workflows/milestone.agent-lifecycle-guide.md. - If the agent is steering milestone sequencing inside one phase, use
.day-shift/workflows/phase.agent-lifecycle-guide.md. - If the agent is working at slice-selection or cross-phase planning scope, use
.day-shift/workflows/slice.agent-lifecycle-guide.md.
This file should stay lightweight. Put substantive lifecycle guidance in the layer-specific files.