# Oversight Team > Use when you are a seat on the oversight pod (a standing monitor-mode rig that keeps OTHER rigs healthy), configuring or running the drift detectors, or choosing whether to intervene vs escalate. Covers the pull-not-poll posture, the v0 detectors (premature-park, process-drift, off-task, token-burn), the intervention ladder (orchestrator-ping -> refocus -> human escalation), and the cheap+deep model economics. NOT for orchestrating your OWN rig (orchestration-team) and NOT the intervention primitive mechanics (watchdog). - Skill: `mvschwarz/oversight-team` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add mvschwarz/oversight-team` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/mvschwarz/oversight-team/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: AI & ML - Author: mvschwarz (https://skillmd.com/u/mvschwarz) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/mvschwarz/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).