KITCHEN OPERATIONS FOR HUMAN + AGENT WORK

Run the systemlike a service.

Professional kitchens already know how to coordinate parallel work, bounded authority, live dependencies, verification, exceptions, and whole-table completion. The Brigade Protocol makes that operating knowledge durable for humans and AI agents.

Read the protocol Give it to Hermes

Authority-bounded
Evidence-led
Campaign-complete

A professional kitchen pass and ticket rail transforming into an interlocked graph of agent work nodes — THE PASS → persistent coordination state → the work graph

ORIGIN

This is not a metaphor pasted onto AI.

It is an operating system translated from the line.

Kitchens teach maximum agency inside precisely understood boundaries. A cook must distinguish what is on their station, what they verified, what another station reported, what is firing, what is ready, what is low, and what only expo can authorize.

Axl Ibiza learned that discipline as a chef, pastry chef, and butcher—including taking whole pigs apart at their actual seams. The same method now governs evidence-led decomposition, agent coordination, and repository-scale transformation.

THE SERVICE LAWMaximum initiative. Exact status. No false authority. No orphaned work.

STATIONS

The operational vocabulary

These are not colorful aliases. Each kitchen primitive defines an invariant the work system must preserve.

STATION

Station ownership

Bounded contributor authority

Own the work in your station. Never confuse local control with authority over the whole service.

TICKET

Ticket

Addressable work unit

If work cannot be named, linked, and inspected, it is not ready to enter the system.

RAIL

Ticket rail

Visible ordered work queue

The queue belongs in shared state, not in one person’s head or a disappearing conversation.

ALL DAY

All day

Live aggregate obligation

Compute the whole outstanding demand from every live ticket. Never optimize one ticket against a false total.

FIRE

Fire

Authorized activation

Queued does not mean active. Work begins only when scope, prerequisites, and authority are clear.

MISE

Mise en place

Verified prerequisite state

Do not start execution until dependencies, tools, context, tests, and rollback paths are ready.

LOW

Low call

Explicit at-risk state

Signal declining capacity before it becomes failure. Early truth gives the system room to compensate.

86 call

Unavailable or blocked state

Remove impossible work from the promise surface immediately. Never let the system operate on phantom availability.

TASTE

Taste plate

Pre-production conformance gate

Prove one complete representative result before asking the system to repeat it at scale.

PICKUP

Pickup

Coordinated convergence

Local completion is not collective completion. Components arrive together or the table waits.

EXPO

Expo

Maintainer integration authority

The station declares readiness. Expo sees the whole table, resolves conflicts, and authorizes release.

TABLE

Completed table

Campaign completeness

Success is the coordinated table—not a pile of locally correct, orphaned dishes.

THE RAIL

State must move explicitly.

Software teams lose control when they collapse seven distinct states into “in progress” and “done.” A kitchen never could.

TICKETED

Named and visible

RAILED

Ordered in live work

MISE VERIFIED

Prerequisites proven

FIRED

Authorized to begin

READY FOR PICKUP

Locally verified

PICKED UP

Converging at the pass

SOLD

Integrated and released

HEARD

Receipt and understanding only. Not agreement or approval.

LOW

Capacity or confidence is declining. Signal before failure.

Unavailable, blocked, withdrawn, or no longer safe to promise.

HANDS

Exact request for review, direction, capacity, or integration help.

BEHIND / CORNER

Shared-surface and collision warning before either actor collides.

REFIRE

Return failed work to execution with the defect made explicit.

HEARD ≠ AGREED.

REVIEWED ≠ APPROVED.

READY FOR PICKUP ≠ MERGED.

TABLE READY ≠ SOLD.

THE BRIGADE

Maximum agency. Zero invented authority.

The discipline is not deference. It is knowing exactly where your knowledge ends, exactly what you can prove, and exactly which transition belongs to someone else.

THE BOUNDARY

Own your station, not the kitchen.

CONTRIBUTOR MAY

Discover, map, decompose, implement, verify, preserve credit, create coordination artifacts, and bring a complete table to the pass.

ONLY EXPO MAY

Speak with integration authority, approve direction, choose the final land order, merge, release, and declare the table sold.

Contributor / agent

Station owner

Inspect, decompose, implement, verify, document, interlock, and declare local readiness.

Cannot claim approval, merge, release, or another station’s receipt.

Coordination designer

Swarm architect

Design the campaign topology, seams, ledgers, dependency edges, evidence contracts, and convergence path.

Can prepare the whole table without possessing integration authority.

Evidence witness

Reviewer

Interrogate claims, inspect gates, record findings, and request a precise refire when evidence fails.

REVIEWED becomes APPROVED only through an explicit authorized act.

Maintainer

Expo

See the whole pass, resolve direction and collisions, choose land order, merge, and release.

Integration authority stays upstream. It is never inferred from contribution volume.

THE PRACTICE, IN THE AUTHOR’S OWN WORDS

“I’m not trying to be the final word on anything.”

“It’s a team effort.”

“Models aren’t my area of expertise at all. Hermes is.”

This is what authority-bounded confidence sounds like: direct about experience, exact about limits, and still willing to act.

SERVICE

The twelve service commands

A compact operating doctrine for humans, agents, reviewers, and maintainers working one service from many stations.

01Own your station.
Take full responsibility inside its boundary. Do not impersonate authority outside it.
02Ticket every obligation.
Make work addressable, inspectable, and bindable before acting on it.
03Count all day from the graph.
Derive total demand from live relationships—not memory or the loudest ticket.
04Set the mise before you fire.
Verify prerequisites, manifests, evidence surfaces, and rollback paths.
05Fire by dependency and land order.
Sequence execution around the real integration surface.
06Say HEARD only for receipt.
Never silently upgrade acknowledgment into agreement or approval.
07Call behind and corner.
Announce shared-surface movement before it becomes collision.
08Call low, 86, and hands early.
Exceptions are operating signals. Make them precise while options remain.
09INTERLOCK every shared surface.
Bind work, actors, evidence, state, provenance, and authority in durable form.
10Refire from evidence.
Name the failed assumption and the new acceptance condition.
11Put verified work at the pass.
Present a complete local contract with checks, limits, and provenance.
12Complete the table. Credit every hand.
Optimize for campaign convergence without erasing who made it possible.

COORDINATION

THE CORE PRIMITIVE

INTERLOCK

A durable, authority-aware coordination record that binds work, actors, dependencies, collisions, evidence, receipts, provenance, and required state transitions at every shared surface.

INTERLOCK is not project-management metadata. It is a repository-native coordination protocol: the context layer that makes multi-actor work composable without requiring everybody to occupy the same room—or the same moment.

A new category: coordination engineering as code.

AN INTERLOCK EXPOSES

01Canonical identity + parent campaign
02Scope + evidence-proven seam
03Station owner or claiming rule
04Dependencies + collision surfaces
05Fire order + intended land order
06Current state + verification time
07Gates + completion receipts
08Authority boundary + next actor
09Provenance + contributor credit
10Supersession + tombstone rules

COMPLETION INVARIANT

LOCAL GATES+REQUIRED EDGES+PROVENANCE+AUTHORIZED TRANSITION

If any term is missing, the work may be locally correct—but the campaign is not complete.

THE ASYNCHRONOUS SERVICE RULE

“This meeting could have been a Git INTERLOCK.”

Meetings create shared moments. INTERLOCKS create shared state.

01OBSERVE

A person or agent surfaces a fact

02WRITE

The fact enters the canonical object

03BIND

Affected work and actors receive edges

04TRANSITION

The next state and authority are explicit

05PERSIST

The next actor continues without a meeting

THE CUT

Find the real seams before touching the knife.

A trained butcher does not impose imaginary boundaries on a whole animal. They read structure, tension, joints, connective tissue, and the intended cuts. Evidence-led decomposition does the same to a codebase.

WHOLE-PIG ENGINEERING

Prove the structural and historical seam before splitting the system.

READ THE TISSUE

Interfaces and call graphs
Responsibility clusters
Failure and test boundaries
Git history and prior attempts
Issue and pull-request constellations
Contributor ownership and credit

TASTE PLATE

Prove one complete slice.

Run the representative path through the real contract. Only then repeat it across the campaign.

GERMINATION

Salvage work without stealing it.

Rebuild valuable prior contributions against current main, preserve authorship, run the current gate, and bind old and new paths with explicit lineage.

UPTAKE

Language became operating behavior.

The proof is not that people repeated a memorable word. The proof is that other contributors used the objects, vocabulary, state, and ordering rules to situate their own work almost immediately.

39m 42s

Campaign grammar became shared work

A peer contributor turned the new campaign object into a living parity matrix, an Interlock column, GAP identifiers, phases, and bound follow-on work.

Inspect PR #80010 ↗

2h 17m

The coordination contract changed behavior

After a formal interlock notice set the overlap and land order, the other PR author accepted the option and their future rebase obligation.

Read the receipt ↗

33m 48s

Germination crossed author boundaries

The original contributor adopted both the word and the process: current-main salvage, gate enforcement, authorship preservation, and no duplicate work.

Read the adoption ↗

NOBODY NEEDED A MEETING.

Conversation supplied observations. Repository artifacts retained the repaired coordination state, made the next action obvious, and let independent actors continue the service.

MACHINE-INGESTIBLE HANDOFF

Put the protocol in the agent’s mise.

Copy the complete doctrine into Hermes, a GPT, an agent system prompt, or a repository instruction file. The Markdown includes vocabulary, authority, state semantics, INTERLOCK fields, the execution loop, required behaviors, and a standard status report.

Download protocol.md

brigade-protocol.mdREADY FOR PICKUP

---
protocol: brigade-v1
core_primitive: INTERLOCK
canonical_coordination_surface: repository
synchronous_coordination_policy: exception-path
---

PRIME DIRECTIVE
Exercise maximum agency inside precisely
understood boundaries.

STATION: <bounded area owned>
STATE: <exact service state>
INTERLOCKS: <edges + land order>
AUTHORITY BOUNDARY: <cannot decide>
NEXT TRANSITION: <actor + evidence>