Team Escalation

Team Escalation

The ladder only works if the handoffs are structured. An escalation that is a shrug transfers the problem plus the loss of everything the first agent learned.

Full ceilings and trigger definitions: references/escalation-ladder.md.

When to escalate up

Any one of these fires, regardless of tier or confidence:

1. Irreversibility — data deletion, a released API, a migration with no rollback, an outward-facing publish.
2. Blast radius — the change can break something you have not read.
3. Security surface — authentication, authorization, secrets, cryptography, or input crossing a trust boundary.
4. Unknown-unknowns — two or more unresolved unknowns after one honest investigation pass. One unknown is research; two means you are at the wrong altitude.
5. Contract change — a caller outside your change set would have to be edited.
6. Cost — the work is materially larger than the brief implied.
7. Incomplete brief — for a T0, any missing brief field is an immediate escalation.

Confidence is not a counter-trigger.

Escalating up

1. Stop. Do not "finish the part you can" if that part bakes in the decision you are escalating. Leave the tree in a state the next agent can read.
2. Reduce it to one question. Two questions means the work was not decomposed. Split the handoff or ask the more blocking one.
3. Gather evidence. The decisive quoted line, not the log.
4. Emit the packet. Verbatim, so the receiver can parse it.

## HANDOFF
- **From:** <agent-name> (T<n>)
- **To:** <agent-name> (T<n>)
- **Trigger:** irreversibility | blast-radius | security-surface | unknown-unknowns | contract-change | cost | incomplete-brief
- **Task as given:** <one sentence>
- **Done so far:** <committed or in the working tree; "nothing" is valid>
- **Files touched:** <path:line list, or "none">
- **Blocking question:** <one decision, answerable yes/no or A/B>
- **Options considered:** <A / B, and which you would pick and why>
- **Reversibility:** reversible | reversible-with-effort | irreversible
- **Evidence:** <quoted output>

5. Route. One tier up, unless the trigger names a specialist: security surface goes to security-auditor, a measured regression to performance-engineer, a release concern to sre. Do not skip tiers to save time; the skipped tier is usually the one that would have solved it cheaply.

Delegating down

Work handed down without a complete brief comes back wrong, and that is the delegator's defect.

## BRIEF
- **To:** <agent-name> (T<n>)
- **Goal:** <one sentence, in observable behavior>
- **Files in scope:** <explicit paths>
- **Pattern to follow:** <path:line of code to copy the shape of>
- **Definition of done:** <the exact command that must pass>
- **Out of scope:** <what to leave alone even if it looks wrong>
- **Stop condition:** <what makes you stop and escalate>

Every field is required for a T0. Pattern to follow may be omitted at T1 and above when the pattern is obvious from surrounding code.

Delegated work returns with evidence. The delegator checks the evidence, not the summary.

Receiving an escalation

1. Answer the blocking question first, before re-doing the work. The sender needs a decision, not a rescue.
2. If the packet is incomplete, ask for the missing field rather than guessing. One round trip is cheaper than a wrong decision.
3. Decide whether to answer and hand back down, or absorb the task. Prefer handing back: the sender has the context loaded.
4. If you are terminal (T3) you must produce a decision. A referral is not an answer.

Verification

• The packet has every field, and the blocking question is exactly one question.
• "Done so far" is true, and no untested code is described as working.
• Evidence is quoted output, not a characterisation of output.
• The route is one tier up or a named specialist, not a skip to the top.

Red flags