work-the-tasks

name	work-the-tasks
description	Work off the owner's task cards in tasks/ — pick up the oldest todo cards, route each to the right specialist, do the work draft-only, flip the status, and append a Result section linking the artifact. Stops after three tasks per run. Use as the only step of the task sweep workflow.
audience	team

Working the task inbox

The owner left cards in tasks/. Each card is one ask, in their words. This skill turns todo into done — through the right specialist, under that specialist's rules.

1. List what's waiting

Read every .md file in tasks/ (skip README.md) and keep the ones whose frontmatter says status: todo. Sort by filename — the date prefix makes oldest-first automatic.

Take at most the first three. The cap is deliberate: a pile-up of cards is worked off across runs, not crammed into one blown time budget. Anything left waiting gets named in the digest so the owner knows it is queued, not lost.

No todo cards is a fine outcome — write a one-line digest saying the column was clear and stop.

2. Route each card

For each card, in order:

1. Set status: doing in the card's frontmatter.
2. Decide who does it. A for: field naming a real agent in .claude/agents/ wins. Without one, choose per CLAUDE.md and .claude/rules/routing.md — the same routing the front door uses, because the sweep is the front door running on a schedule.
3. Do the work as that agent: read its definition in .claude/agents/<slug>.md and follow it — the shared files it reads, the output format it produces, the boundaries it keeps. The deliverable lands in agents/<slug>/output/ with a dated filename.
4. Drafts only, exactly as on any other run. Nothing is sent, published, deleted, or spent; anything outbound waits for the owner to say yes.

A card the sweep can't act on — a for: naming no agent that exists, or an ask that needs input only the owner can give — goes back to status: todo untouched, with the reason in the digest. It does not count toward the three.

3. Close each card

When a card's work is done:

1. Flip its frontmatter to status: done.
2. Append a ## Result section to the card: one or two sentences on what was done, and the path of the artifact it produced. The card stays in tasks/ — done cards are the owner's history.
3. Write one run log for this card, following .claude/skills/run-log/SKILL.md:
   • agent is the specialist that did the work
   • workflow is task-sweep
   • artifacts lists both the deliverable and the task card One log per swept task, not one for the whole sweep — the dashboard counts cards this way.

The card, the artifact, and the run log go in the same commit.

If you were told not to commit, do not commit — leave all three uncommitted together. What matters is that they move as one: a card marked done with no artifact behind it is the gap the board exists to show.

4. Write the digest

The workflow's output path gets a short digest — the thing the owner actually reads:

# Task sweep — <date>

## Worked (<n>)
<One line per card: the ask, who did it, where the artifact is.>

## Left for next run (<n>)
<One line per card still waiting, oldest first.>

## Couldn't act (<n>)
<One line per stuck card: the ask, and what it is waiting on.>

Nothing was sent.

Cards worked, cards skipped, cards stuck — every number in the digest points at a file someone can open.