The AI-Augmented Team

One line from a real repository

The glossary fixes vocabulary. Use the defined term in code identifiers and UI text, never a synonym.

CLAUDE.md, root of Project Pulse

So what if it had stayed in the meeting?

• A teammate asks an agent to add a peer-evaluation endpoint
• The agent has never attended a meeting
• It finds no rule, picks a reasonable word, ships reviewee
• The codebase says evaluatee everywhere else

1999: two teams, no bad code

Mars Climate Orbiter fires its engine to enter orbit and is never heard from again.

Ground software produced pound-seconds. Navigation software consumed newton-seconds.

The brain is a language model

Trained by predicting the next token over an enormous corpus. It knows Spring Boot. It does not know your project, which was not in the training data.

And it is a function, not a process: text in, text out, then it stops. Nothing carries over.

The whole conversation is re-sent every turn

What looks like memory is re-reading.

• The block of text sent to the model is its context
• The size limit on that block is the context window, measured in tokens

The agent is the loop around it

flowchart LR
    C["context"] --> L["LLM"]
    L --> A["action<br/>read, run, edit"]
    A --> O["result"]
    O --> C
    R[("your repository")] -.-> C
    Y["what you type"] -.-> C

When the session ends, the context is discarded

Tomorrow starts empty and rebuilds from what you type and what it reads from disk.

What it can and cannot read

GitHub as that memory

If the repository is the only memory, the work has to live there too. Not just the code.

Where the work lives

flowchart TD
    M["Milestone<br/><i>use-case area</i>"] --> I["Issue<br/><i>one use case</i>"]
    I --> S1["Sub-issue<br/><i>task</i>"]
    I --> S2["Sub-issue<br/><i>task</i>"]
    S1 --> B1["branch"] --> P1["pull request"]
    S2 --> B2["branch"] --> P2["pull request"]

Well-formed means a stranger can tell it is done

That is what acceptance criteria are for. It is the only test worth remembering.

Issue #33, 124 lines

Make Project Pulse Mobile-Friendly for Student and Instructor Workflows

Background · Summary · the exact pages in scope · Current behavior · Proposed improvement · Non-goals · Acceptance criteria · Risks · Rationale

Issue #37, three sentences

When logging in, and the credentials are invalid/wrong, the application does not show an error on the page.

The solution should be: creating a pop-up that gives feedback to the user. e.i, "invalid credentials."

The console shows the error, but not the page.

Now hand #37 to an agent

What should a branch be?

A branch is not a unit of work. It is a unit of integration: one branch, one pull request, one merge.

Splitting for merge is not splitting for ownership

Review used to be a second opinion

Now it is the first read.

Typing was a slow, involuntary review. The author understood every line because they wrote it.

LGTM

• Read the issue before the diff
• Ask what the agent assumed
• Look where nobody prompted: extensions, empty case, error path
• Explanation test: why is this line here, what does it do on empty input

First, what "done" means

Issue #41 · UC-TEA-assign-students · the course admin assigns students to teams

• An admin can add a student to a team in their section
• A student already on another team in that section is moved, not duplicated
• A student outside the section is rejected, with a message naming why
• The roster updates without a page reload

One owner, three merges

Maya owns all of it. She is a full-stack owner of one use case, not the team's backend person.

What Maya actually does on #42

• Claims it; the card moves to In progress
• git switch -c feat/42-assign-student-backend off main
• Works it, agent or not. Commits carry the number
• Opens a pull request saying Closes #42, naming the criteria it satisfies
• Devon reviews. The issue first, then the diff against it
• Merge. #42 closes, the board moves, #41 stays open at one of three

And the one that needs none of this

UC-RUB-view-rubric: one Vue call, one controller method, one service method, five tests.

One sub-issue. One branch. One hour.

What the chain buys you

Issue, sub-issue, branch, pull request. Every link recorded, for free.

flowchart LR
    R["use case<br/>in the spec"] --> I["Issue"] --> S["Sub-issue"] --> B["branch"] --> C["commits"] --> P["pull request"] --> M["merged code"]

Answerable without asking anyone:

• Which commits implemented this requirement?
• Which pull request completed this use case, and who reviewed it?
• This line is strange. What asked for it?

Your board's vocabulary

Onboard the agent like a new hire

It re-onboards itself every session. So put it in a file.

AGENTS.md      the real charter, read by ~two dozen tools
CLAUDE.md      one line: @AGENTS.md

Project Pulse layers it

Your contract goes in the repo too

docs/team-contract.md, signed by all six. Each member commits their own signature line.