---
id: "0043"
date: 2026-07-17
status: Accepted
supersedes:
superseded-by:
affected-paths: [plugins/os-context/prompts/session-start/10-orchestration.md, plugins/os-context/skills/audit-sessions/references/rubric.md]
affected-components: [os-context, audit-sessions]
---

# 0043 — Absolute delegation policy: main loop as executive with enumerated exemptions

## Context

The shipped os-context orchestration rules (prompts/session-start/10-orchestration.md, wording tuned in the WS4 eval loop) gated delegation on a per-task judgment: delegate when a mechanical sequence exceeds ~3 tool calls, work directly when the chain is short, judgment-dependent, or interactive. IRL transcript review (2026-07-17) showed the failure mode of that frame: the main-loop model must predict chain length and follow-up probability at decision time, both unknowable, and the errors land systematically on the keep-it-in-session side. Each 'short chain' decision is locally defensible, is re-made fresh with no memory of accumulated cost, and one chain reliably leads to another — sessions blow past 100k tokens of carried tool results on a fable/opus-tier main loop. Judgment-shaped rules are also expensive to audit: /os-context:audit-sessions had to judge judgment calls rather than count violations.

## Decision

Delegation is the default, not a threshold call. The main loop acts as the session's executive: it interprets the user, plans, delegates, verifies, and reports — it never does grunt work, regardless of how short the coming chain looks. Direct work is limited to an enumerated, mechanical exemption list (user-named file reads; diff/verification review before sign-off; single state-inspection commands; acts only the main loop can perform). Grunt work routes to ONE persistent sonnet manager agent spawned at the first delegable work and continued via SendMessage, not spawn-per-errand; fresh spawns only for genuinely parallel independent work. Tier routing: haiku for fully specified mechanical batches; sonnet as default manager tier; opus entered on observed failure (sonnet wrong or stuck twice on the same problem) rather than forecast, plus judgment-dense end-to-end work. Verification stays executive: the main loop reads the diff, not the report of the diff.

## Consequences

Easier: main-loop context stays small, extending session lifetime before compaction/clear; the audit rubric becomes largely countable (non-exempt main-loop tool calls are violations) instead of interpretive; the economics stop depending on per-episode forecasts. Harder: trivial errands pay delegation overhead (spawn prompt, round-trip latency, report) that direct work would not; interactive tight-loop troubleshooting pays a wall-clock tax per round-trip since the old interactive carve-out was deliberately dropped as judgment-shaped; a main loop that never touches the repo can drift toward vague direction, mitigated by the exemption allowing grounding reads of user-named artifacts and by diff review. The WS4 eval sets validated the old wording and are contaminated, so behavioral validation of the new wording comes only from future IRL session audits.

## Alternatives rejected

1) Keep the per-task threshold heuristic (status quo): rejected — requires predicting chain length, which is unknowable at decision time and biased toward direct work; empirically produced 100k+-token main-loop sessions. 2) Cumulative session-budget trigger (delegate once main-loop tool-result tokens pass a budget): rejected as primary rule — better than per-task forecasting but still lets early episodes accrete and still needs a judged threshold; absorbed instead as the rationale (every byte re-billed per turn) rather than the mechanism. 3) Four-tier standing hierarchy with forecast routing (fable→opus→sonnet→haiku, choosing tier by predicted difficulty): rejected — 'does this need opus?' is the same unfalsifiable forecast the policy bans, and deep chains lose intent fidelity; replaced by failure-triggered escalation, which is observable. 4) Evaluative exemptions ('unless it's quick'): rejected — any judgment-shaped exemption reintroduces the broken prediction; exemptions must be enumerable.
