The agentic fabric
The eyes on the outside.
For: developers and reviewers
Scouts are the agent ring's senses. Each one is a narrow, read-only reader that watches a single kind of source — an inbox, a backlog, a pipeline, a repository — and drops a short summary into one shared signal inbox for the ring to act on. They are deliberately the simplest, most constrained agents in the system: they look, they note, they never touch.
The scout contract
Every scout obeys the same hard contract. It is what makes them safe to point at sensitive sources: a scout can only ever read and report, so the worst it can do is miss something — never corrupt, send, or leak.
What every scout must do
- Read only — never change the thing it watches
- Write only to the shared signal inbox — nothing else
- Keep a per-source cursor and advance it only on a successful write
- Stay inside a wall-clock budget and a cost circuit-breaker
What no scout may do
- Never send a message, reply, or reaction
- Never spawn a helper or message a peer — no fan-out
- Never ingest sensitive content — route it for review instead
- Never skip ahead past an item it failed to record
How a scout works
A scout's life is a tight loop: read since the cursor, summarise, write a signal, advance the cursor. If a write fails, the cursor stays put, so the item is retried next sweep rather than lost.
flowchart LR SRC(["📥 Source
inbox · backlog · pipeline · repo"]):::source subgraph loop ["🔁 THE SCOUT LOOP — tight · cyclic · bounded"] direction LR CUR["1 · Read since
cursor"]:::scout SUM["2 · Summarise
first line only"]:::scout SIG[("3 · Write to
📨 signal inbox")]:::db ADV["4 · Advance cursor
only on ✅"]:::scout CUR ==> SUM ==> SIG ==> ADV ADV == next sweep ==> CUR end SRC == peek · read-only ==> CUR style loop fill:#f0fbf2,stroke:#16a34a,stroke-width:2.5px,color:#14532d classDef source fill:#fef3c7,stroke:#d97706,stroke-width:2.5px,color:#78350f classDef scout fill:#dcfce7,stroke:#16a34a,stroke-width:2px,color:#14532d classDef db fill:#f1f5f9,stroke:#475569,stroke-width:2.5px,color:#0f172a
The signal inbox is the only thing a scout writes. Everything downstream — grouping, classifying, briefing — is the ring's job, not the scout's.
The family, one card at a time
The scouts share one mascot — a cardinal in field-ranger kit — because they are variations on a single idea. What differs is the source each one watches and the kind of signal it emits.
Signal Scout
Watches the operator's inbox, chat, and meeting transcripts for items worth the ring's attention. The original, live-proven scout.
Backlog Sentinel
Watches the work-item backlog for changes since the last sweep — one signal per item revision.
Pipeline Watcher
Watches the sales pipeline for opportunity changes in the operator's territory, under the operator's own identity.
Reuse Scout
Sweeps an allow-list of repositories for reusable patterns — ratified decisions, shared stubs, schema fragments.
Intake Triage
Filters inbound signals against a configured allow-list and routes per-customer items to the right queue. Refuses to run if its allow-list is empty.
Comms Harvest
Pulls inbound email and chat replies and lands them as conversation signals — the inbound half of the conversation-grouping substrate.
The privacy gate
Scouts touch real inboxes and real backlogs, so their handling of sensitive material is the most important thing about them. The rule is simple: anything regulated, confidential, or otherwise sensitive is routed for human review, never ingested. A scout enqueues a summary — a first line, not a body — and never copies diffs, attachments, or message contents into the signal inbox.