Standard: Working Rhythm — how an agent collaborates

The shared working agreements for AI-driven work across the mesh: how to track it, when to stay out of the owner's way and when to put something in front of them, and — the one that has cost real rework — not building past the brief. Distilled from pokered-save-editor-2's collaboration notes and Random AI Prompt's working-agreements; general to any project an agent helps run.

Canonical, project-agnostic standard. Complements planning.md (plan before you execute) and agent-tooling.md (PowerShell + file tools, execute-don't-hand- off). Planning is the what; this is the rhythm.

The rules

1. Track the work with tasks — early, comprehensively, live. Open a task list at the start of anything with more than one step — not retroactively, not "if it gets complicated". Break it down properly (a real breakdown, not three vague buckets), keep statuses live (in_progress when you start, completed the moment it's done), and add tasks the instant new work surfaces. When you learn something worth keeping, record it. The task list is a working artifact the owner watches — it does not replace the durable notes/; it carries the in-flight trail.
2. Work in the background; foreground the moment it's worth a look. Agent-driven builds, tests, runs, captures, and git all run hidden/headless — nothing steals the owner's screen or focus while you're working. The other half is just as binding: when it's ready for them to look at it, open it — in front of them, already on the right screen, without being asked. Don't finish with "it's ready for your review" and leave them to go find it; and prefer showing a captured image to popping a window unbidden mid-work.
3. Adjacency is not a brief — don't build what wasn't asked for. A feature gets its own brief first, then research, then a design, then code. A phase does not get to absorb a neighbouring feature because the data happens to sit next to it, or because it'd be "easy while we're here". When a briefed feature genuinely needs an un-briefed one, it reads it — it does not build UI or scope for it. A sketch drawn from the data layout is a map of what exists, not of what the owner wants a person to be able to do; it carries no authority.
4. When in doubt, ask before building, not after. A short question up front is cheaper than undoing work built on a guess. Surface the ambiguity (and any hacky-only path — see engineering-quality.md) rather than committing a direction.

Verify (is it being followed?)

The per-standard slice the compliance audit aggregates — done/partial/missing: