Pull Card

Pull a card

Kanban's foundational principle (Anderson) is pull-based work intake: a worker takes the next item when capacity exists, rather than having work pushed at them. This skill is the autonomous worker — it pulls one card off the queue, works it end-to-end, commits.

The pull principle is what makes autonomous operation safe. Work isn't shoved at agents on a timer; agents pull on their own terms, filtered through the ready-to-pull predicate (status: open, human_gate: none, no active waiting_on impediment). The human steers by curating WHAT'S in the queue and at what gate; an explicit impediment overlay (waiting_on / waiting_until) hides hard waits automatically — advances edges are advisory and do NOT hide a card from the queue.

What to do

Check for already-claimed work first:

goc --status active -v 2>&1 | head -20

Treat any listed active card as a soft lock. Do not claim the same card, or adjacent/conflicting work, unless the user explicitly asks to continue that active card.

Pick the highest-contribution ready card (--ready filters to status: open ∧ human_gate: none ∧ no active waiting_on overlay — dependency-readiness is advisory display only, an advances prereq that is still open shows up as "awaiting" but does NOT hide the card from the queue):

goc --ready -v 2>&1 | head -22

The last line of goc --ready is a leverage comparison: Pulling <title> (value N). Highest gated card: <title> (value M, gate <kind>). When M >> N (≥3× higher value), the autonomous puller is about to work a small card while a much higher-value card sits parked behind a human gate — that's a signal to ping the human to lower the gate (decide-card for decision, the human's session for session) before draining low-value queue items. When the leverage is close, just pull. The line is omitted when no gated cards exist or the queue is empty.

Then:

1. the advance-card skill (with <title> active) to claim. (The status flip is the soft lock against parallel sessions.)
2. Read the body, the DoD, and any referenced files.
3. Implement.
4. the finish-card skill (with <title>) to close (DoD-gated), then commit the work and closure.

The card body is the briefing the original filer wrote. Trust it.

Fixing what you surface (fix-through)

A pull-card session routinely surfaces new defects while working its card — a sibling bug in the same function, an adjacent one-liner, a missing guard — or finds one when the queue is empty. The reflex inherited from the audit-deck skill is "flag, don't fix": file a card and leave it. But that reflex is audit's, not the worker's. A session that already has the relevant code loaded and the diagnosis done is the cheapest place to land a small fix; deferring it to a separate fresh-context run that must rediscover, reload, and re-diagnose is pure overhead.

So fix it through — file the card, then claim → implement → close it in the same session — when all of these hold:

• Gate-free. It would file at human_gate: none: the fix is determined, with no decision or taste call between credible alternatives.
• Small and single-site. The fix is mechanically clear and bounded — rule of thumb, ~one source file plus its regression test. If it fans out across modules, it is not fix-through.
• Not a meta-fix. It is not the Nth instance of a root-cause shape that should become one architectural card (the audit-deck sibling-sweep rule). Four instances of one shape is a deliberate decision — file it, don't inline it.
• Close to loaded context. It lives in code this session already has in focus. A defect spotted in a far-off module is fixed better by a fresh run with that module loaded — file it and move on.

Always file the card (the create-card skill), even when you fix it seconds later. The card is the record axis, and its DoD carries the TDD contract — the regression test that proves the fix. Fix-through removes the wasted second run, not the card. Each fix-through finding is its own card and its own commit, kept separate from the card you pulled.

When a finding does not clear the bar — it needs a decision, fans out across the codebase, is a meta-fix family, or sits far from your loaded context — file it and leave it in the queue. The fresh-context separation earns its cost there.

Fix-through is not "drain the queue." Close the card you pulled plus at most the small defect(s) it entangled, then exit. One pull per run, with fresh context as the default, stays the operating rhythm (/loop and the cloud pull-card workflow re-trigger for the next card) — fix-through just stops you from leaving a small, ready fix on the floor for a second run to trip over.

When to stop without finishing

• Queue empty. No ready cards. Invoke the audit-deck skill to file one new card from emergent codebase observations. If that finding is fix-through-eligible (see "Fixing what you surface" above), work it to close in this same session instead of exiting. Otherwise — a decision-class, cross-cutting, or meta-fix finding — file it and exit; the next invocation can work it.

• Decision-class question — try the project-specific consultation BEFORE raising the gate. The body reveals the card needs a judgement call (mechanism choice, convention, default value, scope reframing, lit-anchored default). The Andon cord is lazy: agents try the project-local consultation first, then pull.

  cat .game-of-cards/hooks/pull-card.md 2>/dev/null || true

  1. If the consuming repo defined a consultation skill or rubric in the hook above, follow it. If it answers confidently: record the resulting decision via the decide-card skill (with <title> --decision "<choice>" --because "<consultation-name>: <one-line>") (the --because should cite whatever rubric the hook prescribes). Then continue working the card from the decision: implement, close, commit.
  2. If no hook is defined, OR the consultation is ambiguous, OR the question is non-substantive in nature (resource allocation, scope split, deadline, multi-stakeholder alignment, taste call, missing primary evidence): raise the gate to decision or session, write a ## Decision required body section, commit the gate-and-body update. The human will see the parked card.

  This keeps the human out of the loop when project-specific reasoning is decisive. The cord still gets pulled — just not for questions the project's own rubric already answers.

• Fix fails verification. Revert the work, append ## Disproved fix attempt YYYY-MM-DD to log.md, leave the card open with new evidence.

• Pre-commit refuses + research-impacting issue. Pause for the human.

What to report

Whatever happened, in one line of plain fact:

closed <title>: <one-line what-changed>

or

parked <title>: gate raised to <decision|session> — <reason>

or

queue empty; filed <new-title>

or, when you fixed through a finding you surfaced:

closed <pulled-title>; fixed-through <surfaced-title>: <one-line>

Don't narrate context — no "round N", no "via /loop", no "picked because contribution:high". The commit message and closure log already say what happened. The report is the index, not the story.

Pairs naturally with

• /loop pull-card 30m — drains the queue while the user works in another session.
• /schedule pull-card weekday 09:00 — opens the day with one card closed.
• /schedule audit-deck weekly — keeps the queue fed; the pull-principle requires something to pull.
• /schedule refine-deck monthly — hygiene pass.