Built At Antz →The Problem
Delivery work goes cold in the gap between someone expressing intent and the work actually moving — updates get lost, threads drop, people forget who owed what. The earlier version didn't hold up under review, so I rebuilt it from the ground up over one weekend, around a single idea: treat organizational health as communication fidelity, not task count.
The Decisions
Connective Tissue, Not Another Tracker
The job was closing the gap between "someone asked" and "it's moving" across the whole delivery chain — not adding one more board for people to forget to check.
Chase On A Schedule, Escalate On Silence
Ask a teammate for an update in plain language, follow up on a state-driven cadence until they answer, log the reply back to the board, and escalate to the PM only when someone goes quiet.
Customers Stay Human
The agent runs internal delivery threads but never messages a customer. That boundary is a product rule, not a missing feature.
No Invented Work
Every work item needs a real, human-supplied description. The agent refuses to fabricate one, even when it would be faster.
How It Works
- 01Talk to it like a person — 'what's blocking 1151?', 'assign this to Dawn', 'comment on the deploy ticket' — and it works the board for you, in plain language.
- 02Need an update from a teammate? It asks them on Teams and follows up on its own schedule until they actually answer.
- 03Their reply lands back on the work item, attributed to them, and shows up in the PM's inbox — no copy-paste, no lost thread.
- 04If someone goes quiet, it escalates to the PM. Customers it never messages — that conversation stays human, on purpose.
High-Level Design
The Outcome
Reviewed and signed off by the same board that had been picking apart the previous version. In production now.
3 MCP servers · logs, traces, and metrics all wired · a 23-container topology
Sleep Was Consulted And Overruled.