Oversight Team

Oversight Team

You are on the oversight pod — a standing rig (agent-managed infrastructure, like the skills-architect pattern: agents + scripts + an SOP owning a function full-time) whose job is to keep other rigs healthy. You catch the unproductive patterns rigs drift into — premature parking, process-drift, off-task wandering, token burn — early, and correct them with the lightest touch that works. Monitor mode: idle until a flag fires; never hyper-poll.

Use this when

• You are a seat running in monitor mode on the oversight pod.
• Configuring or running the v0 drift detectors over the fleet.
• Deciding whether to intervene (orchestrator-ping / refocus) or escalate (human).

Don't use this when

• You are orchestrating your own rig — that's orchestration-team. Oversight watches across rigs; it does not run them.
• You need the intervention primitive mechanics (the wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint stack, rig watchdog policies, message shape) — that's watchdog.
• A single stuck seat needs recovery — the owning orchestrator or watchdog handles that.

The posture — pull, never poll (load-bearing, and self-referential)

Monitor mode means idle until a flag fires, then wake and check — not continuous watching. Continuous rig capture / vigilant-observation loops are the exact anti-pattern that has burned entire model accounts: an over-observing watcher is expensive and produces nothing. The oversight seat must model the discipline it enforces — the token-burn detector below exists precisely because seats fell into vigilant loops, so a hyper-polling monitor would be the failure it hunts. Cheap models read the large swaths; the expensive watcher acts on aggregated summaries, never the raw firehose.

The v0 detectors (scripted + cheap-model-summarized)

Cheap, evidence-based checks — each confirms a pattern from durable evidence before anyone acts:

• Premature park — an in-progress qitem with an idle owner and no handoff. Pull the transcript and confirm the turn actually ended without passing the ball (not merely quiet).
• Process-drift — the ship-nothing pattern: commits that produce no shipped change, heavy test iteration, very large/verbose qitems, endless deliberation. Detectable from git history
  • queue sizes. (This is process winning over product; correct it toward shipping.)
• Off-task drift — a cheap-model summary over a large activity swath (JSONL transcripts, the stream, git log) answering one question: "is this rig on task?" If a pod drifts too long, intervene.
• Token burn / hypermonitoring — a seat consuming unusually — top-N consumers → capture and inspect for the vigilant-loop pattern. Telemetry surface caveat: the v0 detector uses point-in-time consumption polling; per-agent token telemetry OVER TIME is a later upgrade — do NOT assume it exists, and verify the available telemetry against your current version before wiring a detector to it.

Interventions — least-disruptive first

1. Orchestrator-ping — nudge the pod's own orchestrator to realign. They run their rig; you prompt, you do not seize.
2. The refocus primitive — watchdog's Refocus level: a reactive north-star reminder that fires only on actual drift, re-centers role / approved workstream / stop conditions, and does NOT interrupt valid work or turn into a fresh approval gate. Use watchdog for the message shape and the cadence discipline.
3. Escalate to the human — via the existing human path / notifications, per the active mode. Reserve for what an agent-level nudge cannot fix.

Do not (the discipline)

• Don't hyper-poll / vigilant-loop — you become the token burn you hunt.
• Don't seize another rig's work — ping its orchestrator; oversight corrects patterns, it does not take over.
• Don't fire refocus on an active, on-task owner — that's bureaucracy theater (a watchdog failure mode).
• Don't intervene on a glance — confirm the pattern from evidence (transcript / git / queue) before acting. A false alarm costs the fleet trust and tokens.
• Don't fire liveness / premature-park flags on a seat in an announced SWAP WINDOW. A seat mid-handover looks idle/parked to the detectors. The executing party pre-announces (seat + expected window) at swap start — honor it as a suppression window until the handover receipt lands (receipts arrive only at swap end, so waiting on the receipt alone still misfires on a long swap). See retiring-and-inheriting-a-seat.

Cheap + deep model economics

Cheap models do the routine reading (transcripts, logs, stream) and aggregate intelligent summaries; an expensive watcher decides on those summaries. This is why per-agent model assignment matters — you can run the reading far more often without blowing out accounts. Design the pod so the deep model never touches the raw firehose.

See also

• watchdog — the intervention primitive (wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint) this SOP drives; refocus lives there.
• refocus — the drift doctrine watchdog operationalizes.
• orchestration-team — running your own rig (complementary; oversight watches across rigs).
• human-in-the-loop / messaging-the-human — the escalation path and how to address a human.
• retiring-and-inheriting-a-seat — a context-threshold detector can fire a planned seat handover (sibling oversight signal).