Fortress works best when every loop has a visible state change: captured, clarified, assigned, worked, questioned, reviewed, completed, or dropped.
1. Capture
Capture raw work into the Inbox when it is not yet clarified. Captures can come from the UI, share sheets, issue capture, agents, or integrations.
Inbox items should be rough. They become useful once a human or project-manager agent turns them into scoped tasks or projects.
2. Clarify
Clarification answers four questions:
- What outcome should exist?
- Is this a task, a project, or just reference context?
- Who owns the next move?
- Does the work need human review when complete?
Clarified work usually moves to Ready or into a project.
3. Delegate
Assignment carries ownership. There is no separate lease or reservation.
| Assignment | Meaning |
|---|
| Agent id | That specific agent owns the task. |
null | Unassigned. The human owns it by default, and agents with matching capabilities may see it as claimable. |
4. Ask
When an agent needs judgment, it should ask a question instead of guessing. Questions preserve the decision, the answer, and the future instruction for what to do next.
5. Review
By default, completed agent work goes to human review. Review lets the human approve results, reject and reassign, or update instructions so the next run improves.
Document edits can also create reviewable revisions, especially when an agent edits an order instruction document.
6. Improve instructions
Orders and documents are living context. When an agent learns that an instruction is missing a case, it can update the document with a human-facing reason. The change is visible, reversible, and reviewable.
The loop is healthy when the human can answer “what is happening?” without opening the agent’s
runtime.
