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ADR 0024: Five-agent AOP pipeline ​

Status ​

Superseded by ADR 0027.

Context ​

The previous design made Planner / Researcher / Evaluator / Executor / Reviewer the default orchestration plane. It stored stage, todo, active delegations, artifacts, and handback behavior in CollaborationCell.pipelineState, and exposed tools such as group_delegate and cell_advance_stage directly to the model.

That design proved too rigid:

  • It made every multi-agent interaction look like a five-role pipeline.
  • It coupled IM group membership to task state.
  • It made post-turn harness behavior part of the main path.
  • It made local subagents, remote mesh agents, and group peers use different state machines.

Decision ​

Five-agent is retained only as an optional WorkflowStrategy.

ts
kernel.registerWorkflowStrategy(createFiveAgentWorkflowStrategy())
await kernel.runWorkflowStrategy('five-agent', input)

The strategy creates a task graph:

  1. Planner decomposes the goal.
  2. Researcher gathers facts.
  3. Evaluator chooses an approach and records a concise decision summary.
  4. Executor produces the deliverable.
  5. Reviewer verifies the result.

Roles are task metadata. They do not write to CollaborationCell, and they do not own state transitions. The only state transition authority is OrchestrationKernel.

Migration Notes ​

  • Removed (2026): Model-facing cell_* pipeline tools (cell_submit_artifact, cell_advance_stage, etc.). Use orchestration_* + internal_room instead.
  • PipelineService and cell.pipelineState remain for /collab reset and reading archived legacy state only.
  • five-agent WorkflowStrategy is opt-in (kernel.registerWorkflowStrategy(createFiveAgentWorkflowStrategy())); not registered at startup by default.
  • group_delegate is not a public model-facing orchestration tool in the default path.
  • New strategies should emit WorkflowTaskSpec[] and let the kernel create tasks, resolve dependencies, run executors, and publish events.
  • Visible reasoning must be stored as task.thinking summaries or task.progress, never raw chain-of-thought.

Consequences ​

  • The default agent path is simpler: user input becomes a run/task handled by a selected executor.
  • Five-agent remains available for projects that explicitly opt into that workflow.
  • Group-chat collaboration can use the same task graph, but appears through GroupMentionExecutor and IM projections.