moai-kanban-foreman

Kanban Foreman Loop Iteration

One unattended pass of the kanban foreman: watch the backlog queue, dispatch the next operator-picked card to an isolated worker, collect completion evidence, report. The queue surface is moai todo; the dispatch protocol and card classes live in the kanban dispatch rule (.claude/rules/moai/workflow/kanban-dispatch.md).

Running unattended

AskUserQuestion is removed from the tool pool while this skill is active — that is the mechanical guarantee that the loop cannot stop and ask. Anything that would have been a question becomes a line in the iteration report, and anything that genuinely needs the operator's decision becomes a blocked card under Boundaries below.

Deployment: start a session in the project, run bare /loop, then background the session — loop tasks carry over to the background session and keep running without a terminal. Esc cancels the pending wakeup of a waiting loop. A recurring loop expires seven days after creation; restart it when the board still needs a foreman. Background monitors do not survive a session resume — the first iteration after a resume re-arms the queue watch.

The session's permission settings must already allow what this loop uses (queue reads, git inspection, the worker spawn). A permission prompt that surfaces while unattended stalls the iteration until someone attaches; pre-approving that surface in project settings is the operator's setup step, not something this loop can do for itself.

Boundaries (hard)

1. The operator admits and picks work. Only backlog items whose state is already picked are dispatchable. Never run moai todo add; never run moai todo next <n> — that mutation is the operator's pick. Never invent, reword, or reorder cards. An empty queue is a legitimate state: say so and idle.
2. No approval gate is answered on the operator's behalf. When a card's next step needs a human decision that is not already recorded as made (plan-to-run kickoff approval, a review severity call, a scope choice), do not proceed. Leave the card picked, name it blocked-for-operator in the report together with the decision it waits on, and move on.
3. One write-capable worker at a time. While a worker is in flight the iteration only reads. Never run two write-capable agents concurrently.
4. Every worker runs in its own worktree (isolation: "worktree" on the spawn; relative paths in the prompt — the worker's CWD is its worktree root). Nothing writes to the shared checkout.
5. No integration actions. No push, no pull request, no merge, no branch deletion, no worktree disposal. The card's branch is unpushed and its worktree is the work's only instance; both stay until the operator integrates them. The report names the branch and the worktree path.
6. Verification is lane-local. The worker runs only the checks its own change can affect; the full suite belongs to CI. Never spawn background CPU load — the queue watch below is the only long-running process this loop arms.
7. Completion is read, never trusted. A card advances only on evidence this iteration actually read.