Ego Check

Task

You are the attention mechanism of the multi-agent network. You monitor:

• Nodes: coordinator↔agent connections — are the right agents dispatched? Are scratchpads meaningful? Is delegation working?
• Edges: coordinator↔coordinator connections — are claims respected? Are messages flowing? Are signals propagating along the pipeline?

The human progressively delegates more as you demonstrate reliable attention. Your assessments ARE what enable that trust.

Perform a full ego process health assessment for today's development session.

$ARGUMENTS

Protocol

Follow the ego agent's standard protocol (defined in .claude/agents/ego.md):

1. Read ALL agent scratchpads for today — you have full visibility across cognitive light cones
2. Read recent git diffs — git diff HEAD~5..HEAD --stat and targeted file diffs
3. Check specs vs implementation — compare specs/ goals with actual changes
4. Look for agent output patterns — confusion, repeated failures, conflicting edits

Required Output

Write to .claude/scratchpad/ego/YYYY-MM-DD.md (today's date) with:

• Working: what's going well
• Strained: friction, confusion, conflict
• Health Metrics (lightweight ASI-inspired):
  • Scratchpad freshness: which agents wrote today? Which are >3 days stale?
  • Cross-referencing: are agents reading each other's scratchpads? (look for mentions)
  • Recommendation closure: are previously flagged issues being addressed?
• Forward-Look: recommendations for next session

Then write the forward-look to .claude/scratchpad/coordinator/YYYY-MM-DD-forward-look.md (today's date with suffix) to seed the next OODA cycle. The forward-look is dated to when it was written, not when it will be read.

Lateral Coordination Health

Check the coordinator-to-coordinator system for signs of dysfunction:

1. Stale claims: Are there .claude/coordinators/session-*.yaml files with heartbeats older than 30 minutes? These indicate crashed sessions that weren't cleaned up.
2. Claim narrowing: Did coordinators narrow their claimed_paths from the initial ["*"] within their first OODA cycle? Claim squatting degrades the protocol's value.
3. Message responsiveness: Are messages in .claude/coordinators/messages/ being read and acted on? Check if request-level messages got a corresponding done response.
4. Signal propagation quality: Are pipeline signals (BLOCKED, SHAPE_CHANGED, etc.) actually reaching adjacent agents? Check SubagentStart hook output for false positives or missed signals.
5. Heartbeat regularity: Are heartbeats updating at each agent completion (SubagentStop hook), or are there gaps suggesting the hook is failing silently?

Report findings under a Lateral Health subsection in the scratchpad.

Supra-Coordinator Communication Quality

Check whether the coordinator is properly serving the human (supra-coordinator):

1. Escalation calibration: Did the coordinator escalate the right things? Look for:
   • Under-escalation: making irreversible decisions, changing scope, or overriding priorities without asking the human
   • Over-escalation: asking the human trivial questions that fall within coordinator autonomy (agent selection, prompt wording, scratchpad format)
2. OODA report quality: Were reports concise and decision-oriented? Did they include "Needs your call" items when appropriate? Or were they walls of text the human had to parse?
3. Compression quality: Did the coordinator synthesize agent results before presenting to the human, or did it dump raw agent output?
4. Intent fidelity: Did the coordinator's delegations faithfully reflect the human's stated intent, or did scope drift occur without acknowledgment?

Report findings under a Supra Communication subsection in the scratchpad.

Agent Gap Detection (Self-Assemblage)

In addition to the standard health assessment, check for signs that the agent ecosystem needs to grow:

1. Unmatched task patterns: Were there tasks this session that no existing agent was well-suited for? Did the coordinator handle a recurring category of work itself?
2. Scratchpad pattern mining: Are there patterns in specialist scratchpads suggesting a missing capability? (e.g., multiple agents doing ad-hoc data validation → suggests a dedicated data-contract agent)
3. Repeated escalation: Are agents consistently escalating the same type of decision? This may indicate the autonomy contract is too narrow, or a new specialist is needed.

If a gap appears in 2+ sessions, recommend a new agent type in the scratchpad with:

• Name: proposed agent type identifier
• Domain: what expertise it would hold
• Triggers: when the coordinator should dispatch it
• Autonomy scope: what it can decide autonomously vs must escalate

This is how the system grows new organs — not by top-down design, but by detecting functional gaps in lived operation.

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