cc-os/plugins/os-sdlc/reference/horizon.md

horizon

Status: horizon — explicitly not being built yet; this doc exists to keep these OUT of v1 scope while preserving the design intent — as of 2026-07-16 Connects to: pipeline-stages, worktree-parallelism, never-ask-twice, overview

Purpose

Parks the ideas that shaped the 2026-07-16 design session but are deliberately excluded from v1, so they don't get silently reintroduced as scope creep and don't get lost either. Load this when scoping any future os-sdlc milestone, or when a v1 stage's design seems to be straining toward one of these — that strain is expected; the boundary is intentional.

Design

• Wake-on-trigger. An issue state change (e.g. label added, ticket moved to "ready") wakes the pipeline instead of a human running /implement manually. v1 is deliberately manual — the factory is developed and iterated within interactive sessions until it's trusted to run autonomously. Autonomy is earned the same way never-ask-twice describes for individual decisions, applied here to the pipeline's own trigger.
• Herdr integration (https://herdr.dev/docs/, socket API at https://herdr.dev/docs/socket-api/). A small deterministic controller — no LLM — opens panes, starts interactive Claude Code sessions, sends stage prompts (send_keys-style), detects completion, reads the result, and triggers the next stage. Rationale: Anthropic now charges extra time allotment for headless runs, so driving automated coding through headless mode would eat into the allotment the Max plan's coding was bought for; Herdr-driven interactive sessions bill as normal usage instead, preserving that allotment for other purposes (e.g. a future Hermes integration). Load-bearing unknown to spike before leaning on this at all: does the Herdr socket API give reliable "agent finished" detection, or only heuristic pane-scraping? If it's only heuristic scraping, completion-detection false positives/negatives could silently corrupt pipeline stage transitions — this needs to be proven, not assumed, before Herdr becomes load-bearing infrastructure.
• Router agent dispatching tickets to specialized pipelines (chore/bug/feature/hotfix, each with a different stage shape). Deferred until v1's single pipeline shape is proven insufficient — matches the ladder described in the SecondBrain vault taxonomy note; adding a router before it's needed would be exactly the premature-granularity mistake pipeline-stages already rejected once (the seam-creator/implementor split).
• Mobbin UX decision-tree seeding. See never-ask-twice — a pre-seeded convention library (mobbin.com) for the UI-flow decision category, letting front-end decisions start at semi autonomy instead of hitl. Horizon because it depends on the category-autonomy mechanism existing and being trusted first.
• End-state vision (verbatim intent from the user, 2026-07-16): plan alongside the AI in one window; when ready, work is delegated, automatically prioritized, decomposed, and worked until complete or blocked; blockages are resolved immediately AND minted into ADRs/best practices/conventions so that next time the AI confidently picks the obvious path or presents a narrowed choice; the factory self-improves over time and agents take agency as confidence in their decisions is earned.

Open questions

• Whether wake-on-trigger and Herdr integration are actually separable milestones (wake-on-trigger could plausibly ship without Herdr, using headless mode at the accepted allotment cost) or whether they're coupled in practice.
• What "trusted to run autonomously" concretely means as an exit criterion for v1 — likely an ask-rate threshold fed by never-ask-twice's audits, but not yet defined.
• Whether the router-agent ladder rungs (chore/bug/feature/hotfix) match the vault taxonomy note's categories exactly or need adjustment once real ticket volume exists.

Sources

• Herdr docs: https://herdr.dev/docs/, https://herdr.dev/docs/socket-api/
• SecondBrain vault: taxonomy/ladder note (chore/bug/feature/hotfix router categories)
• mobbin.com (design-pattern library)
• ADR-0037
• 2026-07-16 design session (this doc's origin, including verbatim end-state vision)