ADR-017 — Agent Workspace Product Boundary
Keep Agent Workspace focused on independent-repository understanding, bounded execution, results, and lineage.
Status
Accepted
Context
Earlier ADRs established a Git control repository, independent repository boundaries, isolated Runs, Candidates, and optional knowledge promotion. The four-scope vocabulary introduced later is useful across an ecosystem, but it can be misread as a requirement for ws to own planning, scheduling, loops, or deployed runtime state.
The product’s durable problem is narrower: agents need to understand and work across independent repositories with shared context while keeping mutation scope explicit and execution disposable.
Decision
Agent Workspace owns:
- repository and declared shared-context discovery;
- context composition and selected-only materialization;
- bounded Task execution and write limits;
- Run, Candidate, result, and lineage records.
A Task is durable intent supplied by a caller. A Run is one bounded attempt. A Candidate is the reviewable result. The Task Workspace is the disposable execution environment for that attempt.
The System Workspace, Workstream, Task Workspace, and Runtime Workspace remain ecosystem scopes with explicit ownership. A declaration-only System registry is optional. Planner goals, prioritisation, schedules, retries, budgets, and loop definitions remain caller-owned. PM2, Docker Compose, Git/FS, LocalLink, or another runtime owner owns deployed state and lifecycle.
Consequences
The product can be used directly from a user objective without prescribing a repository list, while preserving the current one-mutated-repository-per-Run default. Multi-repository understanding is core; a future multi-Candidate flow still does not imply an atomic multi-repository transaction.
The current discover capability is membership filtering over declared relationships, not semantic discovery. Richer on-demand context resolution is an interface proposal that must be versioned and tested before being described as implemented.
Earlier ADRs remain historical decisions. Where “workspace” was used as a catch-all term, read it through the four-scope vocabulary and this product boundary; do not silently expand ws ownership.
Rejected expansion
Do not create a competing Planner/scheduler or absorb an existing orchestrator without a compatibility assessment. Do not create system-workspace or agent-orchestration repositories now; evaluate them only at the gates in the implementation plan. Do not duplicate runtime configuration owned by LocalLink or another deployed-state system.