The agent begins with Linear and current production evidence, not a source-code search. It produces one evidence bundle, then chooses one outcome: stop, escalate, no-code, vendor or infra handoff, or PR.
This is the core shape of the PRODE suite: a coordinator inside a durable runner, supported by read-only specialists and constrained by explicit human approval gates.
The system is useful because production tickets rarely fail from lack of code access. They fail from missing context, stale assumptions, unclear ownership, insufficient evidence, and unsafe escalation paths.
Humans own irreversible actions: production writes, deploy-risk changes, PR merge, Linear Done or Cancelled transitions, broad telemetry suppression, and sensitive data boundaries.
Concepts first
The terminology matters because it prevents the agent from becoming one large unbounded prompt. Each concept has one job.
Runner
The outer control plane for leases, retries, state, idempotency, approval waits, and resume-after-crash behavior.
Coordinator
The main agent process. It owns the ticket decision, routes specialists, classifies the work, and writes handoffs.
Specialists
Read-only evidence workers for Sentry, AWS, database, vendor, support, release, reproduction, code path, and review.
Evidence bundle
The go/no-go artifact: sources, facts, confidence, gaps, classification, and approval state.
PRODE Wiki
Operational memory. It can suggest where to look; it cannot prove the current incident.
Stop state
A deliberate safe outcome when evidence, confidence, ownership, or approval is not sufficient.
One run, end to end
The run is intentionally linear until the evidence bundle exists. Parallelism happens inside specialist gathering, not inside the final decision.
Lease the ticket
The runner acquires linear:{ticket_id} so one automation owns the work.
Read Linear
The coordinator fetches ticket text, labels, comments, attachments, Sentry URLs, request IDs, and timestamps.
Inventory tools
It records which MCPs, connectors, CLIs, skills, and blocked capabilities are available.
Read memory
Relevant PRODE Wiki pages may guide queries and negative controls, but they do not count as evidence.
Route specialists
Specialists gather current facts from Sentry, AWS, DB, vendor, release, support, reproduction, and code paths.
Bundle evidence
The coordinator records sources, findings, confidence, gaps, classification, and approval state.
Decide
Below 70% confidence, missing evidence, or pending approval stops the run. A narrow code fix may proceed.
Fix and hand off
After the evidence gate, the agent reads code, patches, verifies, opens a PR, and updates Linear.
Monitor after merge
After a human merge signal, the runner checks recurrence and proposes redacted learnings.
Setup
The suite works only if the repo points agents at one authoritative workflow and the runtime records what happened outside the prompt.
linear:{ticket_id}..agents/skills/prode-triage/SKILL.md is the normative workflow. Repo instructions point to it rather than duplicating rules.Runner contract
The runner persists state; the coordinator makes decisions; specialists gather evidence; humans approve irreversible actions.
Lease
Acquire, heartbeat, expire, and resume. Never race another active run.
Idempotency
Find existing comments, branch, PR, specialist outputs, and artifacts before creating new ones.
Approval wait
Pause until approval matches the exact action, approver, timestamp, and expiry.
Evidence and confidence
The evidence bundle is the transition point between investigation and implementation. The agent may implement only when required specialists are complete or explicitly skipped, confidence is at least 70%, and approvals are satisfied.
Safety
The agent is powerful at reading and conservative at mutating. Production DB access is read-only and narrow. Sentry, AWS, vendor, and GitHub mutation is blocked or approval-gated. Linear receives summaries, not raw production payloads.
Allowed
Request IDs, Sentry issue IDs, releases, versions, log groups, and redacted source names.
Never include
Secrets, tokens, contact details, payment identifiers, KYC fields, copied DB rows, or full payloads.
Stop
Any production write, lock, migration, backfill, broad suppression, merge, or Done/Cancelled transition waits for humans.
Rollout
Roll out the suite by making one skill authoritative, adding the safety substrate, then moving from assisted investigations to automated PR handoff.
Canonical suite
Keep prode-triage authoritative and wrap or remove old split skills.
Safety substrate
Add learning inbox, wiki ignore rules, redaction lint, and CI checks.
Runner
Implement durable state, leases, approvals, evidence bundles, PR handoff, and post-merge monitoring.
Wiki
Promote only reviewed, redacted, source-backed learnings into durable operational memory.
Keep reading
The comprehensive standard ADR page with diagrams, acceptance criteria, and implementation details.
The underlying decision record for the suite, specialist routing, and automation runner.