ADR 0210: Objectives outlive agent turns

Status: accepted (James, 2026-10-02). Applies ADR 0203 and ADR 0188.

Context

A seat's turn status and short-lived stance describe activity. Neither says which enduring objective it is pursuing. An active /goal can exist between turns, and an issue reference can remain useful after the stance expires. The owner needs to see both facts without turning Clankie into another tracker.

Decision

The fleet projects optional goal and assignment metadata on each seat. Captain conversation goals also arrive in the fleet as conversation-keyed records, and in conversation list/get responses. Goal changes advance the fleet cursor independently of turn status.

Readers request includeWork: true on fleet, roster, list and get operations. Without it, responses omit the new work fields so older strict clients keep working. The app retries without the selector when an older host refuses it.

Codex goals come from its native goals_1.sqlite, opened read-only for the seat's known session ID. This reads metadata, never resumes a thread, imports a transcript or starts a model turn. Missing stores, unknown schemas, and unsupported harnesses are unknown. Linked Codex seats use the registered fleet SSH connection and the remote Node SQLite reader against CODEX_HOME (or the remote user’s .codex), selecting only host-observed session IDs. Reads are bounded to 48 sessions and five seconds per fleet, cached for ten seconds, and shared across concurrent polls. Only complete remote objectives of at most 16,384 SQLite characters are transferred; oversized or NUL-containing text is unknown, never a raw prefix to redact after truncation. Local reads retain the full objective for redaction before bounding the projected text. An unavailable store or invalid observation preserves the last known goal with its original native timestamps; it never clears the goal or invents a status. Changing a fleet connection or native session does not transfer that cached goal to its replacement. Codex owns goal lifecycle and budgets; Clankie's existing autonomy runtime owns captain goals. When a local Codex TUI is Clankie's native head, its goal is projected onto his default conversation instead. His native head can state an assignment through the same CLI; it appears on the default conversation and in the fleet's conversation-keyed assignments.

An agent may explicitly state an assignment with clankie work-on. The state_work operation identifies the caller through its Herdr pane and source socket, just like state_stance. It is unavailable through the device relay. The service persists the assignment against the native occupant ID, so a pane move preserves it and a replacement occupant does not inherit it. clear removes the assignment without changing a native goal or tracked issue.

An assignment contains a short objective and an optional exact {repoId, itemId} reference. It has no lifecycle, acceptance criteria or tracker mutation. Issue associations are never guessed from prose, names or issue numbers alone. The repo's existing tracker remains authoritative.

Consequences

An active goal never makes an idle seat appear to be running. Paused, blocked, completed and budget-limited objectives remain inspectable. Token usage is budget consumption, never a completion percentage.

Ordinary tasks require an explicit assignment. Native goal observation currently covers local and linked Codex seats; other harnesses can publish assignments through the same local CLI. A future Codex storage change can make goal observation unknown until the adapter is updated, without breaking fleet discovery.