Agent Chief Of Staff

Agent chief of staff

Specialist desks produce output; somebody has to decide what matters this week, hand work to whoever can do it, and notice when something has not moved. Without that layer a company of agents generates reports instead of results. The chief of staff is the loop that turns capacity into completed work.

Team

• Prioritiser (prioritize-tasks): ranks the week's work against stated goals, not against arrival order.
• Router (agent-role-definition): assigns each item to the desk or crew that owns it.
• Chaser (agent-accountability-loop): tracks commitments and escalates what has stalled.

Shape: a weekly cycle sitting above every desk, ending in decisions.

Method

1. Start from the goal, not the inbox. The week's priorities derive from the current objective; anything arriving that does not serve it is queued or declined explicitly (see agent-goal-cascade).
2. Route by ownership, and route once. Each item goes to exactly one desk with a named deliverable. Work assigned to everyone is done by nobody (see agent-work-assignment).
3. Make every assignment a commitment with a date. What, who, by when, written down. An assignment without a date is a suggestion.
4. Sweep for stalls before the cycle ends. Anything past its date without progress is surfaced with the blocker named, not silently rolled forward.
5. Resolve cross-desk conflicts explicitly. Two desks wanting the same resource or disagreeing on a decision is escalated to the human with the trade stated, rather than averaged into inaction.
6. End every cycle with a decision list. Decisions taken, decisions needed, and who owns each. A cycle that ends with a summary has not ended (see agent-decision-log).
7. Protect the human's attention. Only what genuinely needs a human reaches them, ranked, with a recommendation attached.

Run it

In Claude Code, run the chief of staff as the orchestrator: it reads every desk's state file, writes the week's priority file, spawns or messages the owning desks, then runs the chaser over outstanding commitments. A scheduled weekly run makes the cadence real. Port to CrewAI as a hierarchical crew with a manager agent, or LangGraph as a supervisor graph with desks as nodes.

Signals it works

• Every cycle ends with decisions and owners, not a status summary.
• Stalled work is named with its blocker rather than rolled forward.
• The human is asked to decide a small number of ranked things.

Boundaries

The chief of staff coordinates; it does not set strategy, approve spending, or make binding commitments, all of which stop at the accountable human (see agent-company-blueprint). It can only route work to desks that exist and see state that desks report. Judgement about what genuinely matters this quarter remains the operator's.